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Cornell University Library
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Youth and life,
3 1924 014 520 997
Cornell University
Library
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YOUTH AND LIFE
YOUTH AND LIFE
BY
RANDOLPH S. BOURNE
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
fffte ffiibet^be J^^ Cambtiftoe
1913
COPYRIGHT, I9II, I9I2, AND I9I3, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, I913, BY RANDOLPH S. BOURZ>TS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
FUbltshed March ZQ13
CONTENTS
I. YotJTH 1
n. The Two Genekations .... 29
HE. The Virtues and the Seasons of Life . 53
rV. The Life of Ibont 99
V. The Excitement of Friendship . . . 133
VI. The Adventure of Life .... 153
Vn. Some Thoughts on Religion . . . 189
Vin. The Mtstic turned Radical . . . 205
IX. Seeing, we see not 215
X. The Exferimentaij Life .... 225
XI. The Dodging of Pressures .... 247
Xn. For Radicals 289
Xni. The College: An Inner View . . . 311
XTV. A PniLosoyHT of Handicap . . .337
I
YOUTH
YOUTH AND LIFE
YOUTH
How shall I describe Youth, the time of contra-
dictions and anomalies? The fiercest radicalisms,
the most dogged conservatisms, irrepressible
gayety, bitter melancholy,— all these moods are
equally part of that showery springtime of life.
One thing, at least, it clearly is : a great, rich rush
and flood of energy. It is as if the store of life had
been accumulating through the slow, placid years
of childhood, and suddenly the dam had broken
and the waters rushed out, furious and uncon-
trolled, before settling down into the quieter chan-
nels of middle life. The youth is suddenly seized
with a poignant consciousness of being alive, which
is quite wanting to the naive unquestioning exist-
ence of the child. He finds himself overpower-
ingly urged toward self-expression. Just as the
baby, born into a "great, blooming, buzzing con-
fusion," and attracted by every movement, every
color, every sound, kicks madly in response in all
YOUTH AND LIFE
directions, and only gradually gets his move-
ments coordinated into the orderly and precise
movements of his elders,— so the youth sud-
denly bom into a confusion of ideas and appeals
and traditions responds in the most chaotic way
to this new spiritual world, and only gradually
learns to find his way about in it, and get his
thoughts and feelings into some kind of order.
Fortunate the young man who does not make
his entrance into too wide a world. And upon the
width and depth of that new world will depend
very much whether his temperament is to be
radical or conservative, adventurous or conven-
tional. For it is one of the surprising things about
youth that it can so easily be the most conserva-
tive of all ages. Why do we suppose that youth
is always radical? At no age are social proprieties
more strictly observed, and Church, State, law,
and order, more rigorously defended. But I like to
think that youth is conservative only when its
spiritual force has been spent too early, or whenthe new world it enters into is found, for somereason, to be rather narrow and shallow. It is so
often the urgent world of pleasure that first
catches the eye of youth; its flood of life is drawnoff in that direction; the boy may fritter away his
4
YOUTH
precious birthright in pure lightness of heart and
animal spirits. And it is only too true that this
type of youth is transitory. Pleasure contrives
to burn itself out very quickly, and youth finds
itself left prematurely with the ashes of middle
age. But if, in someway, the flood of life is checked
in the direction of pleasure, then it bursts forth
in another, — in the direction of ideals; then we
say that the boy is radical. Youth is always
turbulent, but the momentous difference is
whether it shall be turbulent in passion or, in en-
thusiasm. Nothing is so pathetic as the young
man who spends his spiritual force too early, so
that when the world of ideals is presented to him,
his force being spent, he can only grasp at second-
hand ideals and mouldy formulas.
This is the great divergence which sets youth
not only against old age, but against youth itself:
the undying spirit of youth that seems to be fed
by an unquenchable fire, that does not bum itself
out but seems to grow steadier and steadier as life
goes on, against the fragile, quickly tarnished
type that passes relentlessly into middle life.
At twenty-five I find myself full of the wildest
radicalisms, and look with dismay at my child-
hood friends who are already settled down, have
5
YOUTH AND LIFE
achieved babies and responsibilities, and have
somehow got ten years beyond me in a day. Andthis divergence shows itself in a thousand differ-
ent ways. It may be a temptation to a world of
pleasure, it may be a sheltering from the stimulus
of ideas, or even a sluggish temperament, that
separates traditional and adventurous youth, but
fundamentally it is a question of how youth takes
the world. And here I find that I can no longer
drag the traditional youth along with me in this
paper. There are many of him, I know, but I do
not like him, and I know nothing about him. Let
us rather look at the way radical youth grows
into and meets the world.
From the state of "the little child, to whom the
sky is a roof of blue, the world a screen of opaque
and disconnected facts, the home a thing eternal,
and 'being good' just simple obedience to un-
questioned authority," one steps suddenly into
that "vast world of adult perception, pierced
deep by flaring search-lights of partialunderstand-
ing."
The child has an utter sense of security; child-
hood is unconscious even that it is alive. It has
neither fears nor anxieties, because it is incor-
rigibly poetical. It idealizes everything that it
6
YOUTH
touches. It is unfair, perhaps, to blame parents
and teachers, as we sometimes do in youth, for
consciously biasing our child-minds in a falsely
idealistic direction; for the child will infallibly
idealizeeven his poorest of experiences. Hisbroken
glimpses and anticipations of his own future show
him everything that is orderly, happy, and beau-
tifully fit. He sees his grown-up life as old age,
itself a sort of reversed childhood, sees its youth.
The passing of childhood into youth is, therefore,
like suddenly being turned from the cosy comfort
of a warm fireside to shift for one's self in the
world. Lifebecomes in amoment aprocess of seek-
ing and searching. It appears as a series of blind
alleys, all equally and magnificently alluring, all
equally real and possible. Youth's thirst for ex-
perience is simply that it wants to be everything,
do everything and have everything that is, pre-
sented to its imagiaation. Youth has suddenlybe-
come conscious of life. It has eaten of the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil.
As the world breaks in on a boy with its crash-
ing thunder, he has a feeling of expansion, of sud-
den wisdom and sudden care. The atoms of things
seem to be disintegrating aroimd him. Then come
the tearings and the grindings and the wrenchings,
7
YOUTH AND LIFE
and in that conflict the radical or the poet is made.
If the youth takes the struggle easily, or if his
guardian angels have arranged things so thatthere
is no struggle, then he becomes of that conserva-
tive stripe that we have renounced above. But
if he takes it hard, — if his struggles are not only
with outward material conditions, but also with
inner spiritual ones,— then he is likely to achieve
that gift of the gods, perpetual youth. The great
paradox is that it is the sleek and easy who
are prematurely and permanently old. Struggle
brings youth rather than old age.
In this struggle, thus beset with problems and
crises, all calling for immediate solution, youth
battles its way into a sort of rationalization. Out
of its inchoateness emerges a sort of order; the
disturbing currents of impulse are gradually re-
solved into a character. But it is essential that
that resolution be a natural and not a forced one.
I always have a suspicion of boys who talk of
"planning their lives." I feel that they have wona precocious maturity in some illegitimate way.
For to most of us youth is so imperious that those
who can escape the hurly-burly and make asuddenleap into the prudent, quiet waters of life seem
to have missed youth altogether. And I do not
8
YOUTH
mean here the hurly-burly of passion somuch as of
ideals. It seems so much better, as well as more
natural, to expose one's self to the full fury of the
spiritual elements, keeping only one purpose in
view,— to be strong and sincere,— than to pick
one's way cautiously along.
The old saying is thetruestphilosophy of youth:
"Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these
things shall be added unto you." How impossible
for a youth who is really young to plan his life
consciously! This process that one sometimes sees
of cautiously becoming acquainted with various
ideas and systems, and then choosing deliberately
those that will be best adapted to a concerted
plan, is almost uncanny. This confidence in one's
immunity to ideas that would tend to disarrange
the harmony of the scheme is mystifying and irri-
tating. Youth talks of "getting" or "accepting"
ideas ! But youth does not get ideas,— ideas get
him! He may try to keep himself in a state of
spiritual health, but that is the only immunity he
can rely upon. He cannot really tell what idea or
appeal is going to seize upon him next and make
off with him.
We speak as if falling in love were a unique
phase in the life of youth. It is rather the pattern
9
YOUTH AND LIFE
and symbol of a youth's whole life. This sudden,
irresistible seizure of enthusiasm that he cannot
explain, that he does not want to explain, what is
it but the aspect of all his experience? The youth
sees a pretty face, reads a noble book, hears a stir-
ring appeal for a cause, meets a charming friend,
gets jfired with the concept of science, or of social
progress, becomes attracted to a profession, —the emotion that fixes his enthusiasm and lets out
a flood of emotion in that direction, and lifts him
into another world, is the same in every case.
Youth glories in the sudden servitude, is content
to let the new master lead wherever he will; and
is as surprised as any one at the momentous and
startling results. Youth is vulnerable at every
point. Prudence is really a hateful thing in youth.
A prudent youth is prematurely old. It is in-
finitely better, I repeat, for a boy to start ahead
in life in a spirit of moral adventure, trusting for
sustenance to what he may find by the wayside,
than to lay in laboriously, before starting, a stock
of principles for life, and burden himself so heav-
ily for the journey that he dare not, and indeed
cannot, leave his pack unguarded by the road-
side to survey the fair prospects on either hand.
Youth at its bpst is this constant susceptibility
10
YOUTH
to the new, this constant eagerness to try experi-
ments.
It is here that youth's quarrel with the elder
generation comes in. There is no scorn so fierce
as that of youth for the inertia of older men. The
lack of adjustment to the ideas of youth's elders
and betters, one of the permanent tragedies of
life, is certainly the most sensational aspect of
youth. That the inertia of the older people is
wisdom, and not impotence, is a theory that you
will never induce youth to believe for an instant.
The stupidity and cruelties of their management
of the world fill youth with an intolerant rage.
In every contact with its elders, youth finds them
saying, in the words of Kipling:—" We shall not acknowledge that old stars fade and alien
planets arise.
That the sere bush buds or the desert blooms or the
ancient well-head dries.
Or any new compass wherewith new men adventure
'neath new skies."
Youth sees with almost a passionate despair
its plans and dreams and enthusiasms, that it
knows so well to be right and true and noble,
brushed calmly aside, not because of any sincere
searching into their practicability, but because
11
YOUTH AND LIFE
of the timidity and laziness of the old, who sit in
the saddle and ride mankind. And nothing tor-
ments youth so much as to have this inertia justi-
fied on the ground of experience. For youth thinks
that it sees through this sophism of "experience."
It sees in it an all-inclusive attempt to give the
world a character, and excuse the older generation
for the mistakes and failures which it has made.
What is this experience, youth asks, but a slow ac-
cretion of inhibitions, a learning, at its best, not to
do again something which ought not to have been
done in the first place?
Old men cherish a fond delusion that there is
something mystically valuable in mere quantity
of experience. Now the fact is, of course, that it
is the yoimg people who have all the really valu-
able experience. It is they who have constantly
to face new situations, to react constantly to newaspects of life, who are getting the whole beauty
and terror and cruelty of the world in its fresh andundiluted purity. It is only the interpretation of
this first collision with life that is worth anything.
For the weakness of experience is that it so soon
gets stereotyped; without new situations andcrises it becomes so conventional as to be practi-
cally unconscious. Very few people get any really
12
YOUTH
new experience after they are twenty-five, unless
there is a real change of environment. Most older
men live only in the experience of their youthful
years.
K we get few ideas after we are twenty-five, we
get few ideals after we are twenty. A man's spirit-
ual fabric is woven by that time, and his "experi-
ence," if he keeps true to himself, consists simply
in broadening and enriching it, but not in adding
to it in arithmetical proportion as the years roll
on, in the way that the wise teachers of youth
would have us believe.
But few men remain quite true to themselves.
As their youthful ideals come into contact with
the harshnesses of life, the brightest succumb and
go to the wall. And the hardy ones that survive
contain all that is vital in the future experience
of the man,— so that the ideas of older men seem
often the curious parodies or even burlesques of
what must have been the cleaner and more potent
ideas of their youth. Older people seem often to
be resting on their oars, drifting on the spiritual
current that youth has set going in life, or "coast-
ing" on the momentum that the strong push of
youth has given them.
There is no great gulf between youth and middle
13
YOUTH AND LIFE
age, as there is between childhood and youth.
Adults are little more than grown-up children.
This is what makes their arrogance so insulting,
— the assumption that they have acquired any
impartiality or objectivity of outlook, and have
any better standards for judging life. Their ideas
are wrong, and grow progressively more wrong as
they become older. Youth, therefore, has no
right to be humble. The ideals it forms will be the
highest it will ever have, the insight the clearest,
the ideas the most stimulating. The best that it
can hope to do is to conserve those resources, and
keep its flame of imagination and daring bright.
Therefore, it is perhaps unfair to say that the
older generation rules the world. Youth rules
the world, but only when it is no longer young. It
is a tarnished, travestied youth that is in the sad-
dle in the person of middle age. Old age lives in
the delusion that it has improved and rationalized
its youthful ideas by experience and stored-up
wisdom, when all it has done is to damage themmore or less— usually more. And the tragedy
of life is that the world is run by these damagedideals. That is why our ideas are always a gener-
ation behind our actual social conditions. Press,
pulpit, and bar teem with the radicalisms of
14
YOUTH
thirty years ago. The dead hand of opinions
formed in their college days clutches our leaders
and directs their activities in thisnewand strangely
altered physical and spiritual environment. Hence
grievous friction, maladjustment, social war. And
the faster society moves, the more terrific is the
divergence between what is actually going on and
what public opinion thinks is actually going on.
It is only the young who are actually contempo-
raneous; they interpret what they see freshly and
without prejudice; their vision is always the tru-
est, and their interpretation always the justest.
Youth does not simply repeat the errors and
delusions of the past, as the elder generation with
a tolerant cynicism likes to think; it is ever lay-
ing the foundations for the future. What it thinks
so wildly now will be orthodox gospel thirty years
hence. The ideas of the young are the living, the
potential ideas; those of the old, the dying, or the
already dead. This is why it behooves youth to
be not less radical, but even more radical, than
it would naturally be. It must be not simply
contemporaneous, but a generation ahead of the
times, so that when it comes into control of the
world, it will be precisely right and coincident
with the conditions of the world as it finds them.
15
YOUTH AND LIFE
If the youth of to-day could really achieve this
miracle, they would have found the secret of
"perpetual youth."
In this conflict between youth and its elders,
youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against
the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorse-
less questions to everything that is old and es-
tablished,—Why ? What is this thing good for ?
And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers
of the defenders, it applies its own fresh, clean
spirit of reason to institutions, customs, and ideas,
andjfinding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns
instinctively to overthrow them and build in their
place the things with which its visions teem.
"This constant return to purely logical activ-
ity with each generation keeps the world supplied
with visionaries and reformers, that is to say, with
saviors and leaders. New movements are born
in young minds, and lack of experience enables
youth eternally to recall civilization to sound
bases. The passing generation smiles and cracks
its weather-worn jokes about youthful effusions:
but this new, ever-hopeful, ever-daring, ever-
doing, youthful enthusiasm, ever returning to the
logical bases of religion, ethics, politics, business,
16
YOUTH
art, and social life, — this is the salvation of the
world." 1
This was the youthful radicalism of Jesus, and
his words sound across the ages "calling civiliza-
tion ever back to sound bases." With him, youth
eternally reproaches the ruling generation,— "Oye of little faith!" There is so much to be done
in the world; so much could be done if you would
only dare! You seem to be doing so little to cure
the waste and the muddle and the lethargy all
around you. Don't you really" care, or are you
only faint-hearted? If you do not care, it must be
because you do not know; let us point out to you
the shockingness of exploitation, and the crass
waste of human personality all around you in this
modern world. And if you are faint-hearted, we
will supply the needed daring and courage, and
lead you straight to the attack.
These are the questions and challenges that the
youth puts to his elders, and it is their shifty eva-
sions and quibblings that confound and dishearten
him. He becomes intolerant, and can see all
classes in no other light than that of accomplices
in a great crime. If they only knew! Swept along
himself in an irrationality of energy, he does not
^ Earl Barnes.
17
YOUTH AND LIFE
see the small part that reason plays in the intri-
cate social Mfe, and only gradually does he come
to view life as a "various and splendid disorder
of forces," and exonerate weak human nature
from some of its heavy responsibility. But this
insight brings him to appreciate and almost to
reverence the forces of science and conscious
social progress that are grappling with that dis-
order, and seeking to tame it.
Youth is the leaven that keeps all these ques-
tioning, testing attitudes fermenting in the world.
If it were not for this troublesome activity of
youth, with its hatred of sophisms and glosses,
its insistence on things as they are, society would
die from sheer decay. It is the policy of the older
generation as it gets adjusted to the world to hide
away the unpleasant things where it can, or pre-
serve a conspiracy of silence and an elaborate
pretense that they do not exist. But meanwhile
the sores go on festering just the same. Youth is
the drastic antiseptic. It will not let its elders
cry peace, where there is no peace. Its fierce sar-
casms keep issues alive in the world until they
are settled right. It drags skeletons from closets
and insists that they be explained. No wonder the
older generation fears and distrusts the younger.
18
YOUTH
Youth is the avenging Nemesis on its trail. "It is
young men who provide the logic, decision, and
enthusiasm necessary to relieve society of the
crushing burden that each generation seeks to roll
upon the shoulders of the next."
Our elders are always optimistic in their views
of the present, pessimistic in their views of the
future; youth is pessimistic toward the present
and gloriously hopeful for the future. And it is
this hope which is the lever of progress,— one
might say, the only lever of progress. The lack
of confidence which the ruling generation feels in
the future leads to that distrust of the machinery
of social reform and social organization, or the
use of means for ends, which is so characteristic
of it to-day. Youth is disgusted with such sen-
timentality. It can never understand that curious
paralysis which seizes upon its elders in the face
of urgent social innovations; that refusal to make
use of a perfectly definite programme or admin-
istrative scheme which has worked elsewhere.
Youth concludes that its elders discountenance
the machinery, the means, because they do not
really believe in the end, and adds another count
to the indictment.
Youth's attitude is really the scientific attitude.
19
YOUTH AND LIFE
Do not be afraid to make experiments, it says.
You cannot tell how anything will work mitil you
have tried it. Suppose science confined its in-
terests to those things that have been tried and
tested in the world, how far should we get? It is
possible indeed that your experiments may pro-
duce by accident a social explosion, but we do not
give up chemistry because occasionally a wrong
mixture of chemicals blows up a scientist in a
laboratory, or medical research because an invest-
igator contracts the disease he is fighting. The
whole philosophy of youth is summed up in the
word, Dare! Take chances and you will attain!
The world has nothing to lose but its chains—and its own soul to gain
!
I have dwelt too long on the conflicts of youth.
For it has also its still places, where it becomes
introspective and thinks about its destiny and the
meaning of its life. In our artificial civilization
many young people at twenty-five are still on the
threshold of activity. As one looks back, then,
over eight or nine years, one sees a panorama of
seemingly formidable length. So many crises, so
many startling surprises, so many vivid joys andharrowing humiliations and disappointments, that
20
YOUTH
one feels startlingly old; one wonders if one will
ever feel so old again. And in a sense, youth at
twenty-five is older than it will ever be again. For
if time is simply a succession of incidents in our
memory, we seem to have an eternity behind us.
Middle-aged people feel no such appalling stretch
of time behind them. The years fade out one by
one; often the pressure of life leaves nothing of
reality or value but the present moment. Someof youth's elders seem to enjoyalmost a newbaby-
hood, while youth has constantly with it in all
its vividness and multifariousness that specious
wealth of abrupt changes, climaxes and disillu-
sions that have crowded the short space of its
life.
We often envy the sunny noon of the thirties
and forties. These elders of ours change so little
that they seem to enjoy an endless summer of im-
mortality. They are so placid, so robust, so solidly
placed in life, seemingly so much further from dis-
solution than we. Youth seems curiously fragile.
Perhaps it is because all beauty has something of
the precarious and fleeting about it. A beautiful
girl seems too' delicate and fine to weather a long
life; she must be burning away too fast. This wist-
fulness and haunting pathos of life is very real to
21
YOUTH AND LIFE
youth. It feels the rush of time past it. Only
youth can sing of the passing glory of life, and
then only in its full tide. The older people's la-
ment for the vanished days of youth may be
orthodox, but it rings hollow. For our greatest
fears are those of presentiment, and youth is
haunted not only by the feeling of past change,
but by the presentiment of future change.
Middle age has passed the waters; it has become
static ^nd placid. Its wistfulness for youth is
unreal, and a forced sentimentality. In the same
breath that it, cries for its youth it mocks at
youth's preoccupation with the thought of death.
The lugubrious harmonies of young poets are a
favorite joke. But the feeling of the precarious-
ness of life gives the young man an intimate sense
of its preciousness; nothing shocks him quite so
much as that it should be ruthlessly and instantly
snatched away. Middle age has acclimated itself
to the earth, has settled down familiarly in it, and
is easily befooled into thinking that it will live
here forever, just as, when we are settled comfort-
ably in a house, we cannot conceive ourselves as
ever being dislodged. But youth takes a long time
to get acclimated. It has seen so many mysteries
and dangers about it, that the presence of the
YOUTH
Greatest Mystery and the Greatest Danger must
be the most portentous of things to it.
It is this sense of the preciousness of his life,
perhaps, that makes a youth so impatient of dis-
cipline. Youth can never think of itself as any-
thing but master of things. Its visions are a curi-
ous blend of devotion and egotism. Its enthusi-
asm for a noble cause is apt to be all mixed up
with a picture of itself leading the cohorts to vic-
tory. The youth never sees himself as a soldier in
the ranks, but as the leader, bringing in some
long-awaited change by a brilliant coup d'Stat,
or writing and speaking words of fire that win a
million hearts at a stroke. And he fights shy of
discipline in smaller matters. He does not sub-
mit willingly to a course of work that is not im-
mediately appealing, even for the sake of the
glorious final achievement. Fortimate it is for
the young man, perhaps, that there are so manyorgans of coercion all ready in the world for him,
— economic need, tradition, and subtle influence
of family ambition,— to seize him and nail him
fast to some profession or trade or activity, before
he is aware, or has time to protest or draw back!
It is another paradox of youth that, with all its
fine enthusiasm, it should accomplish so little.
23
YOUTH AND LIFE
But this seeming aimlessness of purpose is the
natural result of that deadly fear of having one's
wings clipped by discipline. Infinitely finer, it
seems to youth, is it to soar freely in the air, than
to run on a track along the ground! And perhaps
youth is right. In his intellectual life, the young
man's scorn for the pedantic and conventional
amounts almost to an obsession. It is only the
men of imagination and inspiration that he will
follow at all. But most of these professors, these
lawyers, these preachers, — what has been their
training and education, he says, but a gradual
losing of the grip of life, a slow withdrawing into
an ideal world of phrases and concepts and artifi-
cial attitudes? Their thought seems like the end-
less spinning out of a spider's web, or like the camel
living upon the fat of his own hump. The youth
fears this sophistication of thought as he would
fear losing his soul. And this seeming perversity
toward discipline is often simply his refusal to let
\ a system submerge his own real and direct reac-
i tions to his observation and experience.
Aiid yet as he studies more and more, and ac-
quires a richer material for thought, a familiarity
with words, and a skill in handling them, he can see
the insidious temptation that comes to thinking
24
YOUTH
men to move all their spiritual baggage over into
that fascinating unreal world. And he admires
almost with reverence the men who have been
able to break through the terrible crust, and have
got their thinking into close touch with Hfe again;
or, best of all, those who have kept their thinking
constantly checked up with life, and are occupied
with interpretingwhat they see about them. Youth
will never be able to see that this is not the only
true and right business of thought.
It is the glory of the present age that in it one
can be young. Our times give no check to the
radical tendencies of youth. On the contrary, they
give the directest stimulation. A muddle of a
world and a wide outlook combine to inspire us
to the bravest of radicalisms. Great issues have
been born in the last century, and are now loose
in the world. There is a radical philosophy that
illuminates our environment, gives us terms in
which to express what we see, and coordinates our
otherwise aimless reactions.
In this country, it is true, where a certain modi-
cum of free institutions, and a certain specious
enfranchisement of the human spirit have been
achieved, youth may be blinded and drugged into
an acquiescence in conditions, and its enthusiasm
25
YOUTH AND LIFE
may easily run into a glorification of the present.
In the face of the more urgent ideals that are with
us, it may be inspired by vague ideas of "liberty,"
or "the rights of man," and fancy it is truly rad-
ical when it is but living on the radicalisms of
the past. Our political thought moves so slowly
here that even our radicalism is traditional. Webreathe in with the air about us the belief that
we have attained perfection, and we do not ex-
amine things with our own eyes.
But more and more of the clear-sighted youth
are coming to see the appalling array of things
that still need to be done. The radical young manof to-day has no excuse for veering roimd to the
conservative standpoint. Cynicism cannot touch
him. For it is the beauty of the modem radical
philosophy that the worse the world treats a man,
the more it convinces him of the truth of his rad-
ical interpretation of it. Disillusion comes, not
through hard blows, but by the insidious sappings
of worldly success. And there never was a time
when there were so many radical young people
who cared little about that worldly success.
The secret of life is then that this fine youthfulspirit should never be lost. Out of the turbulenceof youth should come this fine precipitate — a
26
YOUTH
sane, strong, aggressive spirit of daring and doing.
It must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a hos-
pitality to new ideas, and a keen insight into ex-
perience. To keep one's reactions warm and true,
is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and
perpetual youth is salvation.
II
THE TWO GENEEATIONS
II
THE TWO GENERATIONS
It is always interesting to see ourselves through
the eyes of others, even though that view may be
most imflattering. The recent "Letter to the
Rising Generation," ^ if I may judge from the
well-thumbed and underscored copy of the "At-
lantic" which I picked up in the College Library,
has been read with keen interest by many of myfellows, and doubtless, too, with a more emphatic
approval, by our elders. The indictment of an en-
tire generation must at its best be a difficult task,
but the author of the article has performed it
with considerable circumspection, skirting warily
the vague and the abstract, and passing from the
judge's bench to the pulpit with a facility that
indicates that justice is to be tempered with mercy.
The rather appalling picture which she draws of
past generations holding their breath to see what
my contemporaries will make of themselves sug-
gests, too, that we are still on probation, and so,
before final judgment is passed, it may be pertin-
> The Atlantic Monthly, February, 1911.
31
YOUTH AND LIFE
ent to attempt, if not, from the hopeless nature
of the case, a defense, at least an extenuation of
ourselves.
The writer's charge is pretty definite. It is to
the effect that the rising generation, in its reac-
tion upon life and the splendid world which has
been handed down to it, shows a distinct soften-
ing of human fibre, spiritual, intellectual, and
physical, in comparison with the generations
which have preceded it. The most obvious retort
to this is, of course, that the world in whichwe find
ourselves is in no way of our own making, so that
if our reactions to it are unsatisfactory, or our
rebellious attitude toward it distressing, it is at
least a plausible assumption that the world itself,
despite the responsible care which the passing
generation bestowed upon it, may be partly to
blame.
But this, after all, is only begging the question.
The author herself admits that we are the victims
of 'educational experiments, and, in any event,
each generation is equally guiltless of its world.
We recognize with her that the complexity of the
world we face only makes more necessary our
bracing up for the fray. Her charge that we are
not doing this overlooks, however, certain aspects
32
THE TWO GENERATIONS
of the situation which go far to explain our seem-
ingly deplorable qualities.
The most obvious fact which presents itself in
this connection is that the rising generation has
practically brought itself up. School discipline,
since the abolition of corporal punishment, has
become almost nominal; church discipline prac-
tically nil; and even home discipline, although re-
taining the forms, is but an empty shell. The mod-
ern child from the age of ten is almost his own
master. The helplessness of the modem parent
face to face with these conditions is amusing.
What generation but the one to which our critic
belongs could have conceived of "mothers' clubs"
conducted by the public schools, in order to teach
mothers how to bring up their children ! The mod-
ern parent has become a sort of parlement re-
gistering the decrees of a Grand Monarque, and
occasionally protesting, though usually without
effect, against a particularly drastic edict.
I do not use this assertion as a text for an in-
dictment of the preceding generation; I am con-
cerned, like our critic, only with results. These
are a peculiarly headstrong and individualistic
character among the young people, and a com-
plete bewilderment on the part of the parents.
33
YOUTH AND LIFE
The latter frankly do not understand their child-
ren, and their lack of understanding and of con-
trol over them means a lack of the moral guidance
which, it has always been assumed, young people
need until they are safely launched in the world.
The two generations misunderstand each other
as they never did before. This fact is a basal one
to any comprehension of the situation.
Now let us see how the rising generation brings
itself up. It is perfectly true that the present-day
secondary education, that curious fragmentary
relic of a vitally humanistic age, does not appeal
to them. They will tell you frankly that they do
not see any use in it. Having brought themselves
up, they judge utility by their own standards,
and not by those of others. Might not the fact
that past generations went with avidity to their
multiplication table, their Latin Grammar, and
their English Bible, whereas the rising generation
does not, imply that the former found some intel-
lecrtual sustenance in those things which the latter
fails to find? The appearance of industrial educa-
tion on the field, and the desperate attempts of
educational theory to make the old things palat-
able which fifty years ago were gulped down raw,
argues, too, that there may be a grain of truth in
34
THE TWO GENERATIONS
our feeling. Only after a serious examination of
our intellectual and spiritual viands should our
rejection of them be attributed to a disordered
condition of our stomachs.
The charge that the rising generation betrays
an extraordinary love of pleasure is also true.
The four years' period of high-school life among
the children of the comfortable classes is, in-
stead of being a preparation for life, literally one
round of social gayety. But it is not likely
that this is because former generations were less
eager for pleasure, but rather because they were
more rigidly repressed by parents and custom,
while their energy was directed into other chan-
nels, religious, for instance. But now, with every
barrier removed, we have the unique spectacle
of a youthful society where there is perfectly free
intercourse, an unforced social life of equals, in
which there are bound to develop educative in-
fluences of profound significance. Social virtues
will be learned better in such a society than they
can ever be from moral precepts. An important
result of this camaraderie is that the boy's and
the girl's attitude toward life, their spiritual out-
look, has come to be the same. The line between
the two "spheres" has long disappeared in the
35
YOUTH AND LIFE
industrial classes; it is now beginning to fade
among the comfortable classes.
Our critic has not seen that this avidity for
pleasure is a natural ebullition which, flaring up
naturally, withiu a few years as naturally sub-
sides. It goes, too, without that ennui of over-
stimulation; and the fact that it has been will re-
lieve us of the rising generation from feeling that
envy which invariably creeps into the tone of the
passing generation when they say, "We did not
go such a pace when we were young." After this
period of pleasure has begun to subside, there
ensues for those who have not been prematurely
forced into industry, a strange longing for inde-
pendence. This feeling is most striking among the
girls of the rising generation, and crops up in the
most unexpected places, in families in the easiest
circumstances, where to the preceding generation
the idea of caring to do anything except stay at
home and get married, if possible, would havebeen
inconceivable. They want somehow to feel that
they are standing on their own feet. Like their
brothers, they begin to chafe under the tutelage,
nommal though it is, of the home. As a result,
these daughters of the comfortable classes go into
trained nursing, an occupation which twenty36
THE TWO GENERATIONS
years ago was deemed hardly respectable; or
study music, or do settlement work, or even pub-
lic-school teaching. Of course, girls who have had
to earn their own living have long done these
things; the significant point is that the late rapid
increase in these professions comes from those
who have a comfortable niche in society all pre-
pared for them. I do not argue that this proves
any superior quality of character on the part of
this generation, but it does at least fail to suggest
a desire to lead lives of ignoble sloth.
The undergraduate feels this spirit, too. Heoften finds himself vaguely dissatisfied with what
he has acquired, and yet does not quite know what
else would have been better for him. He stands
on the threshold of a career, with a feeling of
boundless possibility, and yet often without a de-
cided bent toward any particular thing. One could
do almost anything were one given the oppor-
tunity, and yet, after all, just what shall one do?
Our critics have some very hard things to say
about this attitude. They attribute it to an ego-
tistic philosophy, imperfectly absorbed. But mayit not rather be the result of that absence of re-
pression in our bringing-up, of that rigid moulding
which made our grandfathers what they were?
37
YOUTH AND LIFE
It must be remembered that we of the rising
generation have to work this problem out alone.
Pastors, teachers, and parents flutter aimlessly
about with their ready-made formulas, but some-
how these are less efficacious than they used to
be, I doubt if any generation was ever thrown
quite so completely on its own resources as ours
is. Through it all, the youth as well as the girl
feels that he wants to count for something in life.
His attitude, which seems so egotistical to his
elders, is the result of this and of a certain ex-
pansive outlook, rather than of any love of vain-
glory. He has never known what it was to be
moulded, and he shrinks a little perhaps from
going through that process. The traditional pro-
fessions have lost some of their automatic appeal.
They do conventionalize, and furthermore, the
youth, looking at many of their representatives,
the men who "count" in the world to-day, maybe pardoned if he feels sometimes as if he did not
want to count in just that way. The youth "whowould not take special training because it would
interfere with his sacred individuality" is an un-
fair caricature of this weighing, testing attitude
toward the professions. The elder generation
should remember that life is no longer the charted
THE TWO GENERATIONS
sea that it was to our grandfathers, and be ac-
cordingly lenient with us of the rising generation.
Business, to the youth standing on the thresh-
old of life, presents a similar dilemma. Too often
it seems like a choice between the routine of a
mammoth impersonal corporation and chicanery
of one kind or another, or the living by one's wits
within the pale of honesty. The predatory indi-
vidualist, the "hard-as-nails" specimen, does
exist, of course, but we are justified in ignoring
him here; for, however much his tribe may in-
crease, it is certain that it will not be his kind, but
the more spiritually sensitive, the amorphous ones
of the generation, who will impress some definite
character upon the age, and ultimately count for
good or evil, as a social force. With these latter,
it should be noted that, although this is regarded
as a mercenary age, the question of gain, to an
increasingly large number, has little to do with
the final decision.
The economic situation in which we find our-
selves, and to which not only the free, of whom we
have been speaking, but also the unfree of the
rising generation are obliged to react, is perhaps
the biggest factor in explaining our character. In
this reaction the rising generation has a very real
39
YOUTH AND LIFE
feeling of coming straight up against a wall of
diminishing opportunity. I do not see how it can
be denied that practical opportunity is less for
this generation than it has been for those preced-
ing it. The man of fifty years ago, if he was in-
tellectually inclined, was able to get his profes-
sional training at small expense, and usually under
the personal guidance of his elders; if commercially
inclined, he could go into a small, settled, self-
respecting business house, practically a profes-
sion in itself and a real school of character. If he
had a broader outlook, there was the developing
West for him, or the growing industrialism of the
East. It looks, at least from this distance, as if
opportunity were easy for that generation. They
had the double advantage of being more circum-
scribed in their outlook, and of possessing more
ready opportunity at hand. '
But these times have passed forever. Nowa-days, professional training is lengthy and expen-
sive; independent business requires big capital for
success; and there is no more West. It is still as
true as ever that the exceptional man will always
"get there," but now it is likely to be only the
exceptional man, whereas formerly all the able
"got there," too. The only choice for the vast
40
THE TWO GENERATIONS
majority of the young men of to-day is between
being swallowed up in the routine of a big corpora-
tion, and experiencing the vicissitudes of a small
business, which is now an uncertain, rickety aflEair,
usually living by its wits, in the hands of men whoare forced to subordinate everything to self-pre-
servation, and in which the employee's livelihood
is in constant jeopardy. Thegrowing consciousness
of this situation explains many of the peculiar
characteristics of our generation.
It has a direct bearing on the question of respon-
sibility. Is it not sound doctrine that one becomes
responsible only by being made responsible for
something? Now, what incentive to responsibil-
ity is produced by the industrial life of to-day? In
the small business there is the frank struggle for
gain between employer and employee, a contest
of profits vs. wages, each trying to get the utmost
possible out of the other. The only kind of re-
sponsibility that this can possibly breed is the
responsibility for one's own subsistence. In the
big business, the employee is simply a small part
of a big machine; his work counts for so little that
he can rarely be made to feel any intimate respon-
sibility for it.
Then, too, our haphazard industrial system
41
YOUTH AND LIFE
offers such magnificent opportunities to a young
man to get into the wrong place. He is forced by
necessity to go early, without the least training
or interest, into the first work that offers itself.
The dull, specialized routine of the modem shop
or office, so different from the varied work and the
personal touch which created interest in the past,
is the last thing on earth that will mould char-
acter or produce responsibility. When the situa-
tion with an incentive appears, however, we are
as ready as any generation, I believe, to meet it.
I have seen too many young men, of the usual
futile bringing-up and negligible training, drift
idly about from one "job" to another, without
apparent ambition, until something happened to
be presented to them which had a spark of individ-
uality about it, whereupon they faced about and
threw themselves into the task with an energy
that brought success and honor, — I have seen
too much of this not to wonder, somewhat im-
piously perhaps, whether this boasted character
of our fathers was not rather the result of their
coming into contact with the proper stimulus at
the proper time, than of any tougher, grittier
strain in their spiritual fibre. Those among our
elders, who, deploring Socialism, insist so strenu-
42
THE TWO GENERATIONS
ously on the imperfections of human nature, ought
not to find fault with the theory that frail hu-
manity is under the necessity of receiving the
proper stimulus before developing a good char-
acter or becoming responsible.
Nor is the rising generation any the less capable
of effort when conditions call it forth. I wonder
how our critic accounts for the correspondence
schools which have sprungup so abimdantly within
the past fifteen years. They are patronized by
large numbers of young men and women who
have had little academic training and have gone
early into industry. It is true that the students do
not spend their time on the Latin grammar; they
devote themselves to some kind of technical course
which they have been led to believe will qualify
them for a better position. But the fact that they
are thus willing to devote their spare time to study
certainly does not indicate a lack of effort. Rather,
it is the hardest krad of effort, for it is directed
toward no immediate end, and, more than that,
it is superimposed on the ordinary work, which is
usually quite arduous enough to fatigue the youth.
Young apprentices in any branch where there
is some kind of technical or artistic appeal, such
as mechanics or architecture, show an almost
43
YOUTH AND LIFE
incredible capacity of effort, often spending, as I
have seen them do, whole days over problems.
I know too a young man who, appointed very
young to political office, found that the law would
be useful to him, and travels every evening to a
near-by city to take courses. His previous career
had been most inglorious, well calculated by its
aimlessness to ruin any "character"; but the in-
centive was applied, and he proved quite capable
of putting forth a surprising amount of steady
effort.
Our critics are perhaps misled by the fact that
these young men do not announce with a blare of
trumpets that they are about to follow in the
footsteps of an Edison or a Webster. It must be
admitted that even such men as I have cited do
still contrive to work into their time a surprising
amount of pleasure. But thewhole situation shows
conclusively, I think, that our author has missed
the point when she says that the rising generation
shows a real softening of the human fibre. It is
rather that we have the same reserves of ability
and effort, but that from the complex nature of
the economic situation these reserves are not un-
locked so early or so automatically as with former
generations.
44
THE TWO GENERATIONS
The fact that our fathers did not need corre-
spondence schools or night schools, or such things,
implies either that they were not so anxious as we
to count in the world, or that success was an easier
matter in their day, either of which conclusions
furnishes a pretty good extenuation of our appar-
ent incapacity. We cannot but believe that our
difficulties are greater in this generation; it is hard
to see that the effort we put forth to overcome
these difficulties is not proportional to that in-
crease. I am aware that to blame your surround-
ings when the fault lies in your own character
is the one impiety which rouses the horror of
present-day moral teachers. Can it not count to
us for good, then, that njost of us, while coming
theoretically to believe that this economic situa-
tion explains so much of our trouble, yet con-
tinue to act as if our deficiencies were all our own
fault?
Our critics are misled by the fact that we do
not talk about unselfishness and self-sacrifice
and duty, as their generation apparently used to
do, and conclude that we do not know what these
things mean. It is true that we do not fuss and
fume about our souls, or tend our characters like
a hot-house plant. This is a changing, transi-
45
YOUTH AND LIFE
tional age, and our view is outward rather than
inward. In an age of newspapers, free libraries,
and cheap magazines, we necessarily get a broader
horizon than the passing generation had. We see
what is going on in the world, and we get the
clash of different pomts of view, to an extent
which was impossible to our fathers. We cannot
be blamed for acquiring a suspicion of ideals,
which, however powerful their appeal once was,
seem singularly impotent now, or if we seek for
motive forces to replace them, or for new terms in
which to restate the world. We have an eagerness
to understand the world in which we live that
amounts almost to a passion. We want to get be-
hind the scenes, to see how the machinery of the
modem world actually works. We are curious
to learn what other people are thinking, and to
get at the forces that have produced their point of
view. We dabble in philanthrophy as much from
curiosity to see how people live as from any feel-
ing of altruism. We read all sorts of strange philo-
sophies to get the personal testimony of men whoare interpretmg the world. In the last analysis,
we have a passion to understand why people act
as they do.
We have, as a result, become impatient with the
46
THE TWO GENERATIONS
conventional explanations of the older generation.
We have retained from childhood the propen-
sity to see through thmgs, and to tell the truth
with startling frankness. This must, of course, be
very disconcerting to a generation, so much of
whose activity seems to consist in glossing over
the unpleasant things or hiding the blemishes on
the fair face of civilization. There are too manyissues evaded which we would like to meet. Manyof us find, sooner or later, that the world is a very
different sort of place from what our carefully
deodorized and idealized education would have'
us believe.
When we find things simply not as they arci
painted, is it any wonder that we turn to the new
prophets rather than to the old .'' We are more;
than half confident that the elder generation does
not itself really believe all the conventional ideals|
which it seeks to force upon us, and much of our
presumption is a result of the contempt we nat-
urally feel for such timorousness. Too many of
yourpreachers seem to be whistling simply to keep
up your courage. The plain truth is that the
younger generation is acquiring a positive faith,
in contact with which the elder generation with
its nerveless negations feels its helplessness with-
47
YOUTH AND LIFE
out knowing just what to do about it except to
scold the young.
This positive aspect is particularly noticeable
in the religion of the rising generation. As our
critic says, the religious thinking of the preceding
generation was destructive and uncertain. Weare demanding a definite faith, and our spiritual
centre is rapidly shifting from the personal to the
social in religion. Not personal salvation, but
social; not our own characters, but the character
of society, is our interest and concern. We feel
social injustice as our fathers felt personal sin.
Settlement work and socialist propaganda, things
done fifty years ago only by rare and heroic souls
like Kingsley, Ruskin, and Maurice, are now the
commonplaces of the undergraduate.
The religion that will mean anything to the
rising generation will be based on social ideals. Anessay like ex-President Eliot's "Religion of the
Future," which in a way synthesizes science andhistory and these social ideals and gives them the
religious tinge which every age demands, supplies
a real working religious platform to many a youngman and woman of the rising generation, and anmspiration of which our elders can form no con-ception. Perhaps it is unfair to call this religion
48
THE TWO GENERATIONS
at all. Perhaps it is simply the scientific attitude
toward the world. But I am sure that it is more
than this; I am sure that it is the scientific atti-t
tude tinged with the religious that will be ours
}
of the rising generation. We find that we cannot!'
keep apart our religion, our knowledge, our prac-
'
tice, and our hopes in water-tight compartments,j
as our ancestors did. We are beginning to show
an incorrigible tendency to work our spiritual
assimilations into one intelligible, constructive
whole.
It is to this attitudetather than to a softening of|
fibre that I think we may lay our growing disin-
clination to deify sacrifice and suffering. A young
chemistry student said to me the other day,j
"Science means that nothing must be wasted!"
This idea somehow gets mixed up with humanexperience, and we come to believe that human
life and happiness are things that must not be
wasted. Might it not be that such a belief that
human waste of life and happiness was foolish and
unnecessary would possibly be of some avail in
causing that waste to disappear? And one of the
most inspiring of the prophets to the rising gener-
ation, William James, has told us that certain
"moral equivalents" of these things are possible
49
YOUTH AND LIFE
which will prevent that incurable decaying of
fibre which the elder generation so anxiously, fears.
Another result of this attitude is our growing
belief in political machinery. We are demanding
of our preachers that they reduce quality to quan-
tity. "Stop talking about liberty and justice and
love, and show us institutions, or concerted at-
tempts to model institutions that shall be free or
just or lovely," we cry. You have been trying so
long to reform the world by making men "good,"
and with such little success, that we may be par-
doned if we turn our attention to the machinery
of society, and give up for a time the attempt to
make the operators of that machinery strictly
moral. Indeed, the charm of Socialism to so
many of the rising generation is just that scien-
tific aspect of it, its claim of historical basis, and
its very definite and concrete organization for
the attainment of its ends. A philosophy which
gives an illuminating interpretation of the pres-
ent, and a vision of the future, with a definitely
crystallized plan of action with concrete meth-
ods, however unsound it may all be, can hardly
be said to appeal simply to the combination of
"a weak head, a soft heart, and a desire to
shirk."
50
THE TWO GENERATIONS
Placed in such a situation as we are, and with
such an attitude toward the world, we are as in-
terested as you and the breathless generations
behind you to see what destinies we shall work
out for ourselves. An unpleasantly large propor-
tion of our energy is now drained oflE in fighting
the fetishes which you of the elder generation
have passed along to us, and which, out of some
curious instinct of self-preservation, you so vigor-
ously defend. We, on the other hand, are becom-
ing increasingly doubtful whether you believe in
yourselves quite so thoroughly as you would have
us think. Your words are very brave, but the
tone is hollow. Your mistrust of us, and your re-
luctance to convey over to us any of your author-
ity in the world, looks a little too much like the
fear and dislike that doubt always feels in the
presence of conviction, to be quite convincing.
We believe in ourselves; and this fact, we think,
is prophetic for the future. We have an indomit-
able feeling that we shall attain, or if not, that
we shall pave the way for a generation that shall
attain.
Meanwhile our constructive work is hampered
by your distrust, while you blame us for our lack
of accomplishment. Is this an attitude calculated
51
YOUTH AND LIFE
to increase our responsibility and our self-respect?
Would it not be better in every way, more con-
structive and more fruitful, to help us in our as-
pirations and endeavors, or, failing that, at least
to strive to understand just what those aspira-
tions and endeavors are?
Ill
THE VIRTUES AND THE SEASONS OFLIFE
Ill
THE VIRTUES AND THE SEASONS OPLIFE
Each season of life has its proper virtues, as
each season of the year has its own climate and
temperature. If virtue is the excellent working of
the soul, then youth, middle age, and old age,
all have their peculiarways of working excellently.
When we speak of a virtuous life, we should mean,
not a life that has shown one single thread of
motive and attitude running through it, but rather
one that has varied with the seasons, as spring
grows gently into summer and summer into au-
tumn, each season working excellently in respect
to the tilling and harvest of the soul. If it is a vir-
tue to be contented in old age, it is no virtue to
be contented in youth; if it is a virtue for youth
to be bold and venturesome, it is the virtue of
middle life to take heed and begin to gather
up the lines and nets so daringly cast by youth
into the sea of life. A virtuous life means a life
responsive to its powers and its opportunities, a
life not of inhibitions, but of a straining up to the
55
YOUTH AND LIFE
limit of its strength. It means doing every year
what is fitting to be done at that year to enhance
or conserve one's own life or the happiness of those
around one. Virtue is a word that abolishes duty.
For duty has steadily fallen into worse and worse
opprobrium; it has come to mean nothing but
effort and stress. It implies something that is
done rightly, but that cuts straight across the
grain of all one's inclinations and motive forces.
It is following the lines of greatest resistance; it
is the working of the moral machine with the ut-
most friction possible. Now there is no doubt
that the moral life involves struggle and effort,
but it should be the struggle of adequate choice,
and not of painful inhibition. We are coming to
see that the most effective things we do are those
that have some idea of pleasure yoked up with
them. In the interests of moral eflBciency, the
ideal must be the smooth and noiseless workings
of the machine, and not the rough and grinding
movements that we have come to associate with
the word " duty." For the emphasis on the nega-
tive duty we must substitute emphasis on the
positive virtue. For virtue is excellence of work-
ing, and all excellence is pleasing. When weknow
what are the virtues appropriate to each age of
56
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
life, we can view the moral life in a new light. It
becomes not a claim upon us of painful obliga-
tion, but a stimulus to excellent spontaneity and
summons to self-expression.
In childhood we acquire the spiritual goods that
we shall take with us through life; in youth we
test our acquisitions and our tools, selecting,
criticizing, comparing; in old age, we put them
away gently into the attic of oblivion or retire
them honorably, full of years and service. Our
ideas, however, of what those spiritual goods were
that childhood acquired have been very much
confused. We have imagined that we could give
the child "the relish of right and wrong," as
Montaigne calls it. The attempt has usually been
made to train up the child in the moral life,
by telling him from his earliest years what was
right and what was wrong. It was supposed that
in this way he absorbed right principles that
would be the guiding springs of his youthful and
later life. The only diflficulty, of course, with this
theory is that the moral life hardly begins before
the stresses and crises of youth at all. For really
moral activity implies choice and it implies sig-
nificant choice; and the choices of the child are
few in number and seldom significant. You can
57
YOUTH AND LIFE
tell a child that a certain thing is wrong, and he
will believe it, but his belief will be a purely me-
chanical affair, an external idea, which is no more
woven into the stuff of his life than is one of those
curious "post-hypnotic suggestions," that psy-
chologists tell about, where the subject while
hypnotized is told to do something at a certain
time after he awakes. When the time comes he
does it without any consciousness of the reason
and without any immediate motive. Now most
moral ideas in a child's mind are exactly similai: to
these suggestions. They seem to operate with in-
fallible accuracy, and we say, — "What a good
child!
" As a fact the poor child is as much under
an alien spell as the subject of the hypnotist. Nowall this sort of hypnotized morality the younger
generation wants to have done with. It demands
a morality that is glowing with self-consciousness,
that is healthy with intelligence. It refuses to
call the "good "child moral at all; it views him as
a poor little trained animal, that is doomed for the
rest of his life to go through mechanical motions
and moral tricks at the crack of the whip of a
moral code or religious authority. From home and
Sunday-school, children of a slightly timid dispo-
sition get moral wounds, the scars of which never
58
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
heal. They enter a bondage from which they can
never free themselves; their moral judgment in
youth is warped and blighted in a thousand ways,
and they pass through life, seemingly the most
moral of men and women, but actually having
never known the zest of true morality, the relish
of right and wrong. The best intentions of parents
and teachers have turned their characters into
unnatural channels from which they cannot break,
and fixed unwittingly upon them senseless inhi-
bitions and cautions which they find they cannot
dissolve, even when reason and common sense
convince them that they are living under an alien
code. Looked upon from this light, childish good-
ness and childish conscientiousness is all unhealthy
and even criminal forcing of the young plant, the
hot-house bringing to maturity of a young soul
whose sole business is to grow and learn. Whenmoral instruction is given, a criminal advantage
is taken of the child's suggestibility, and all pos-
sibility of an individual moral life, growing nat-
urally and spontaneously as the young soul meets
the real emergencies and problems that life will
present to it, is lost. If, as we are coming more
and more to realize, the justification of know-
ledge is that it helps us to get along with and enjoy
59
YOUTH AND LIFE
and grapple with the world, so the justification of
virtue is that it enables us to get along with and
enjoy and grapple with the spiritual world of
ideals and feelings and qualities. We should be as
careful about giving a child moral ideas that will
be of no practical use to him as we are in giving
him learning that will be of no use to him.
The virtues of childhood, then, we shall not find
in the moral realm. The "good" child is not cul-
tivated so much to-day as he was by the former
I
generation, whose one aim in education and reli-
gion was to bind the young fast in the fetters of a
puritan code; but he is still, in well-brought-up
families, an appalling phenomenon. The child,
who at the age of five has a fairly complete know-
ledge of what God wants him and all around him to
do and not to do, is an illustration of the results of
the confusion of thought that would make child-
hood instead of youth the battle-ground of the
/moral life. We should not dismiss such a child as
quaint, for in him have been sowed the seeds of a
general obscurantism and conservatism that will
spread like a palsy over his whole life. The ac-
ceptance of moral judgments that have no vital
jmeaning to the young soul will mean in later life
the acceptance of ideas and prejudices in political
60
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
and religious and social matters that are uncriti-
cized and unexamined. The "good" child grows
up into the conventional bigoted man. The duties
and tastes which are inculcated into him in child-
hood, far from aiding the "excellent workings of
his soul," clog and rust it, and prevent the fine
free expression of its individuality and genius.
For the child has not yet the material of experi-
ence that will enable him to get the sense of
values which is at the bottom of what we call the
spiritual life. And it is this sense that is so easily
dulled, and that must be so carefully protected
against blunting. That the child cannot form
moral judgments for himself, however, does not
mean that they must be formed for him by others;
it means that we must patiently wait until he
meets the world of vivid contrasts and shocks andj
emergencies that is youth. It is not repairing his
lack of moral sensitiveness to get him to repeat
parrot-like the clean-cut and easily learned taboos
and permissions of the people around him. To get
him to do this is exactly like training an animal to
bolt any kind of food. The child, however, has
too weak a stomach to digest very much of the
moral pabulum that is fed him. The inevitable
result is a moral indigestion, one form of which
61
YOUTH AND LIFE
is the once fashionable sense of sin. The youth,
crammed with uncriticized taboos delivered to
him with the awful prestige of an Almighty God,
at a certain age revolts, and all the healthy values
of life turn sour within him. The cure for this
spiritual dyspepsia is called conversion, but it is a
question whether the cure is not often worse than
the disease. For it usually means that the relish of
right and wrong, which had suddenly become a
very real thing, has been permanently perverted
in a certain direction. By a spiritual operation,
the soul has been forced to digest all this strange
food, and acquires the ability to do so forever
after. Those who do not suffer this operation pass
through life with an uneasiness of spirit, the
weight and burden of an imperfectly assimilated
moral life. Few there are who are able to throw
off the whole soddenness, and if they do they are
fortunate if they are not left without any food at
all. Religious teachers have always believed that
all these processes were necessary for the soul's
health. They have believed that it was better to
have mechanical morals than no morals at all.
When the younger generation sees the damage
such morals work, it would prefer to have none.
Discarding the " good " child, then, we will find
62
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
the virtues of childhood in that restless, pushing,
growing curiosity that is the characteristic of
every healthy little boy or girl. The child's life is
spent in learning his way around the world; in
learning the ropes of things, the handles and
names of whatever comes within the range of his
experience. He is busy acquiring that complex
bimdle of common-sense knowledge that under-
lies all our grown-up acts, and which has become
so automatic with us that it hardly seems possible
to us that we have slowly acquired it all. We do not
realize that thousands of facts and habits, which
have become stereotyped and practically uncon-
scious in our minds, are the fresh and vital experi-
ences of the mind of the little child. We cannot
put ourselves back into that world where the
absorbing business is to give things a position and
a name and to learn all the little obvious facts
about the things in the house and the yard and
the village, and in that far land of mystery be-
yond. What sort of sympathy can we have with
these little people, — we, to whom all this naive
world of place and nomenclature is so familiar as
to seem intuitive? We should have to go back to
a world where every passing railroad train was a
marvel and a delight, where a walk to the village
63
YOUTH AND LIFE
meant casting ourselves adrift into an adventur-
ous country where anything was likely to happen
and where all calculations of direction or return
were upset. It takes children a long time to get
accustomed to the world. This common worka-
day knowledge of ours seems intuitive to us only
because we had so many years during which it
was reiterated to us, and not because we were un-
usually sensitive to impressions. Children often
seem almost as stupid as any young animal, and
to require long practice before they know their
way around in the world, although, once obtained,
this common sense is never forgotten. That child
is virtuous who acquires all he can of it.
This curiosity of childhood makes children the
first scientists. They begin, as soon as their eyes
are open, dissolving this confused mystery of the
world, distinguishing and classifying its parts ac-
cording to their interests and needs. They push
on and on, ever widening the circle, and ever
bringing more and more of their experience under
the subjugation of their understanding. Theybegin the process that the scientist completes.
As children, after several years we came to knowour house and yard, although the attic and cellar
were perhaps still dim and fearsome places. In-
64
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
side the household things were pretty well tabu-
lated and rationalized. It was only when we went
outside the gate that we might expect adventures
to happen. We should have been very much
shocked to see the fire leap from the stove and the
bread from the table, as they did in the "Blue
Bird," but in walking down to the village we
should not have been surprised to see a giant or a
fairy sitting on the green. When we became famil-
iar with the village, the fairies were, of course,
banished to remoter regions, until they finally
vanished altogether. But it is not so long ago that
I lost the last vague vestige of a feeling that there
were fairies in England.
The facility, one might almost say skill, which
children show in getting lost, is the keynote of
childhood's world. For they have no bearings
among the unfamiliar, no principles for the solu-
tion of the unknown. In their accustomed realm
they are as wise and canny and free from super-
stition as we are in ours. We, as grown-ups, have
not acquired any magical release from fantasy.
The only difference is that we are accustomed
to make larger hazards of faith that things will
repeat .themselves, and that we have a wider ex-
perience to check off our novelties by. We have
65
YOUTH AND LIFE
charted most of our world; we unfortunately have
no longer any world to get lost in. To be sure, we
have opened up perhaps an intangible world of
philosophy and speculation, which childhood does
not dream of, and heaven knows we can get lost
there! But the thing is different. The adventure
of childhood is to get lost here in this every-day
world of common sense which is so familiar to us.
To become really as little children we should have
to get lost again here. The best substitute we can
give ourselves is to keep exploring the new spirit-
ual world in which we may find ourselves in
youth and middle life, pushing out ever, as the
child does, our fringe of mystery. And we can
gain the gift of wonder, something' that the child
does not have. He is too busy drinking in the
facts to wonder about them, or to wonder about
what is beyond them. We may count ourselves
fortunate, however, that we are able to retain the
child's virtue of curiosity, and transmute it into
the beauty of spiritual wonder.
It is facts and not theories that the child is
curious about, and rightly. He cannot assimilate
moral theories, nor can he assimilate any other
kind of theories. It is his virtue to learn how the
world runs; youth will be time enough to phil-
66
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
osophize about that running. It is the immediate
and the present that interest children, and they
are omnivorous with regard to any facts about
either. "What they hear about the world they
accept without question. We often think whenwe are telling them fairy stories or animal stories
that we are exercising their poetic imagination;
but from their point of view we are telling them
sober facts about the world they live in.' We are
often surprised, too, at the apathy they show in
the midst of wonders that we point out to them.
They are wonders to us because we appreciate the
labor or the genius that has produced them. In
other words, we have added a value to them. But
it is just this value which the child-mind does not
get and can never get. To the child they are not
surprising, but simply some more information
about his world. All is grist that comes to the
child's mill. Everything serves to plot and track
for him a new realm of things as they are.
The child's mind, so suggestible to facts, seems
to be almost impervious to what we call spiritual
influences. He lives in a world hermetically
sealed to our interests and concerns. Parents and
teachers make the most conscientious efforts to
influence their children, but they would better
67
YOUTH AND LIFE
realize that they can mfluence them only in the
most indirect way. The best thing they can do for
the children is to feed their curiosity, and provide
them with all the materials that will stimulate
their varied interests. They can then leave the
"influence" to take care of itself. The natural
child seems to be impregnable to any appeals of
shame, honor, reverence, honesty, and even ridi-
cule,— in other words, to all those methods we
have devised for getting a clutch on other peo-
ple's souls, and influencing and controlling them
according to our desires. And this is not because
the child is immoral, but simply because, as I
have tried to show, those social values mean as
yet nothing to him. He lives in a splendid isola-
tion from our conventional standards; the influ-
ences of his elders, however well-directed and
prayerful they may be, simply do not reach him.
He lives unconscious of our interests and motives.
Only the "good" child is susceptible, and he is
either instinctively submissive, or is the victim of
the mechanical imposition of standards and moral
ideas.
The child works out what little social morality
he does obtain, not under the influence of his
elders, but among his playmates. And the stand-
68
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
ards worked out there are not refined and moral
at all, but rough ones of emulation and group
honor, and respect for prowess. Even obedience,
which we all like to think of as one of the indis-
pensable accomplishments of a well-trained child,
seems to be obtained at the cost of real moral
growth. It might be more beneficial if it were not
too often merely a means for the spiritual edifica-
tion of the parents themselves. Too often it is the
delight of ruling, of being made obeisance to, that
is the secret motive of imposing strict obedience,
and not our desire simply that they shall learn the
excellent habits that are our own. One difficulty
with the child who has "learned to mind" is that,
if he learns too successfully, he runs the risk of
growing up to be a cowardly and servile youth.
There is a theory that since the child will be
obliged in later life to do many things that he does
not want to do, he might as well learn how while
he is young. The difficulty here seems to be that
learning to do one kind of a thing that you do not
want to do does not guarantee your readiness to
do other kinds of unpleasant things. That art
cannot be taught. Each situation of compulsion,
unless the spirit is completely broken, will have
its own peculiar quality of bitterness, and no
69
YOUTH AND LIFE
guarantee against it can be inculcated. Life will
present so many inevitable necessities to the chUd
when he gets out into the world that it seems pre-
mature to burden his childhood with a training
which will be largely useless. So much of oiu*
energy is wasted, and so much friction created,
because we are unwilling to trust life. If life is the
great demoralizer, it is also the great moralizer.
It whips us into shape, and saddles us with re-
sponsibilities and the means of meeting them,
with obligations and the will to meet them, with
burdens and a strength to bear them. It creates
in us a conscience and the love of duty, and en-
dows us with a morality that a mother and father
with the power and the love of angels Working
through all the years of our childhood could not
have created within us. Trust life and not your
own feeble efforts to create the soul in the child!
The virtue of childhood, then, is an exhaustless
curiosity and interest in the world in which the
child finds himself. He is here to learn his wayaround in it, to learn the names of things and
their uses, how to use his body and his capacities.
This will be the most excellent working of his soul.
If his mind and body are active, he will be a
"good" child, in the best sense of the word. We70
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
can almost aflford to let him be insolent and irrev-
erent and troublesome as long as he is only curi-
ous. If he has a temper, it will not be cured bycurbing, but by either letting it burn out, or not
giving it fuel to feed on. Food for his body and
facts for his mind are the sustenance he requires.
From the food will be built up his body, and from
the facts and his reactions to them will slowly
evolve his world of values and ideals. We cannot
aid him by giving him our theories, or shorten the
path for him by presenting him with ready-made
standards. In spite of all the moral teachers,
there is no short cut to the moral life of youth, any
more than there is a royal road to knowledge. Nor
can we help him to grow by transferring some
of our superfluous moral flesh to his bones. The
child's qualities which shock our sense of pro-
priety are evidences not of his immorality, but of
his pre-morality. A morality that will mean any-
thing to him can only be built up out of a vast
store of experience, and only when his world has
broadened out into a real society with influences
of every kind coming from every side. He cannot
get the relish of right and wrong until he has
tasted life, and it is the taste of life that the child
does not have. That taste comes only with youth,
71
YOUTH AND LIFE
and then with a bewildering complexity and
vividness.
But between childhood and youth there comes
a trying period when the child has become well
cognizant of the practical world, but has as yet no
hint of the gorgeous colors of youth. At thirteen,
for instance, one has the world pretty well
charted, but not yet has the slow chemistry of
time transmuted this experience into meanings
and values. There is a crassness and materiality
about the following three or four years that have
no counterpart until youth is over and the sleek
years of the forties have begun. How cocksure
and familiar with the world is the boy or girl at
this age! They have no doubts, but they have no
glow. At no time in life is one so unspiritual, so
merely animal, so much of the earth, earthy. Howdifferent is it to be a few years later! How shaken
and adventurous will the world appear then! For
this waiting period of life, the virtues are harder
to discover. Curiosity has lapsed, for there do not
seem to be many things left to be curious about.
The child is beautifully unconscious of his own
ignorance. Similarly has the play activity dimin-
ished; the boy has put away his Indian costumes,
and the girl her dolls. At this season of life the
72
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
virtue would seem to consist in the acquirement
of some skill in some art or handicraft or tech-
nique. This is the time to search for the budding
talents and the strong native bents and inclina-
tions. To be interesting is one of the best of
virtues, and few things make a person more inter-
esting than skill or talent. From a selfish point of
view, too, all who have grown up with unskillful
hands will realize the solid virtue of knowing howto do something with the hands, and avoid that
vague restlessness and desire to get at grips with
something that haunts the professional man who
has neglected in youth to cultivate this virtue
of technique. And it is a virtue which, if not
acquired at that time, can never be acquired.
The deftness of hand, alertness of mind, are soon
lost if they are not taken advantage of, and the
child grows up helpless and unskillful, with a
restless void where a talent and interest should
be.
It is with youth, then, that the moral life be-
gins, the true relish of right and wrong. Out of
the crucible of passion and enthusiasm emerge the
virtues of life, virtues that will have been tested
and tried in the furnace of youth's poignant re-
actions to the world of possibilities and ideals that
73
YOUTH AND LIFE
has been suddenly opened up to it. Those young
people who have been the victims of childish
morality will not feel this new world so clearly or
keenly, or, if there did lurk underneath the crust
of imposed priggishness some latent touch of
genius, they will feel the new life with a terrible
searing pain that maddens them and may perma-
nently distort their whole vision of life. To those
without the spark, the new life will come stained
by prejudice. Their reactions will be dulled; they
will not see clearly; and will either stagger at the
shock, or go stupidly ahead oblivious of the spirit-
ual wonders on every side. Only those who have
been allowed to grow freely like young plants,
with the sun and air above their heads, will get
the full beauty and benefit of youth. Only those
whose eyes have been kept wide open ceaselessly
learning the facts of the material and practical
world will truly appreciate the values of the moral
world, and be able to acquire virtue. Only with
this fund of practical knowledge will the youth be
able to balance and contrast and compare the bits
of his experience, see them in the light of their
total meaning, and learn to prefer rightly one bit
to another. It is as if silent forces had been at
work in the soul during the last years of childhood,
74
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
organizing the knowledge and nascent sentiments
of the child into forms of power ready for the free
expression of youth.
Youth expresses itself by falling in love.
Whether it be art, a girl, socialism, religion, the
sentiment is the same; the youth is swept away
by a flood of love. He has learned to value, and
how superlative and magnificent are his values!
The little child hardly seems to love; indeed, his
indifference to grown people, even to his own
parents, is often amazing. He has the simple
affection of a young animal, but how different his
cool regard from the passionate flame of youth!
Love is youth's virtue, and it is wide as well as
deep. There is no tragic antithesis between a
youth's devotion to a cause and his love for a girl.
They are not mutually exclusive, as romanticists
often love to think, but beautifully compatible.
They tend to fuse, and theystimulate and ennoble
each other. The first love of youth for anything is
pure and ethereal and disinterested. It is only
when thwarted that love turns sensual, only
when mocked that enthusiasm becomes fanatical
or mercenary. Worldly opinion seems to care
much more for personal love than for the love of
ideals. Perhaps it is instinctively more interested
75
YOUTH AND LIFE
in the perpetuation of the race than in its progress.
It gives its suffrage and approval to the love of a
youth for a girl, but it mocks and discredits the
enthusiast. It just grudgingly permits the artist
to live, but it piles almost insurmountable obsta-
cles in the path of the young radical. The course
of true love may never run smooth, but what of
the course of true idealism ?
The springs that feed this love are found, of
course, in hero-worship. Sexual love is objectified
in some charming and appealing girl, love for
ideals in some teacher or seer or the inspiring
personality of a friend. It is in youth that we can
speak of real influence. Then is the soul respons-
ive to currents and ideas. The embargo which
kept the child's mind immune to theory and opin-
ion and tastes is suddenly lifted. In childhood,
our imitation is confined to the external; we copy
ways of acting, but we are insensitive to the finer
nuances of personality. But in youth we become
sensitive to every passing tone and voice. Youth
is the season when, through this sensitiveness, the
deadly pressures get their purchase on the soul; it
is also the season for the most momentous and
potent influences for good. In youth, if there
is the possibility that the soul be permanently
76
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
warped out of shape, there is also the possibility
that it receive the nourishment that enables it to
develop its own robust beauty. It is by hero-
worship that we copy not the externals of person-
ality, as in childhood, but the inner spirit. Wefeel ourselves somehow merged with the admired
persons, and we draw from them a new stimulating
grace. We find ourselves in them. It is not yield-
ing to a pressure that would force us to a type,
but a drawing up of ourselves to a higher level,
through the aid of one who possesses all those
qualities which have been all along, we feel, our
vague and hitherto unexpressed ideal. We do not
feel that our individualities are being lost, but
that they are for the first time being found. Wehave discovered in another personality all those
best things for which our hearts have been hun-
gering, and we are simply helping ourselves to
that which is in reality our own. Our hero gives
of himself inexhaustibly, and we take freely and
gladly what we need. It is thus that we stock up
with our first store of spiritual values. It is from
the treasury of a great and good personality that
we receive the first confirmation of ourselves. In
the hero-personality, we see our own dim, baby
ideals objectified. Their splendor encourages us,
77
YOUTH AND LIFE
and nerves us for the struggle to make them
thoroughly our own.
There is a certain pathos in the fact that
parents are so seldom the heroes from whom the
children derive this revelation of their own per-
sonality. It is more often some teacher or older
friend or even a poet or reformer whom the youth
has never seen and knows only through his words
and writings. But for this the parents are partly
responsible. They are sufficiently careful about
the influences which play upon their young child-
ren. They give care and prayers and tears to
their bringing-up in the years when the children
are almost immune to any ^cept the more obvi-
ous mechanical influences, and learn of ideals and
values only in a parrot-like fashion. But when the
child approaches youth, the parent is apt to relax
vigilance and, with a cry of thanksgiving and self-
congratulation that the child has been brought
safelythrough so many perils to the desired haven,
to surrender him to his own devices. Just at the
time when he becomes really sensitive for the
first time to spiritual influences, he is deprived of
this closest and wannest influence of the home.
But he has not been brought into a haven, but
launched into a heaving and troubled sea. This
78
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
is the time when his character lies at stake, and
the possibility of his being a radical, individual
force in the world hangs in the balance. Whether
he will become this force depends on the pressures
that he is able to dodge, and on the positive ideals
he is able to secure. And they will depend largely
on the heroes he worships, upon his finding the
personalities that seem to contain all the best for
which he yearns. Hero-worship is the best pre-
servative against cheapness of soul, that besetting
sin of modern youth. It directs our attention
away from the light and frothy things of the
world, which are wont to claim so much of youth's
interest, to qualities that are richer and more
satisfying. Yet hero-wqrship is no mere imitation.
We do not simply adopt new qualities and a new
character. We rather impregnate our hitherto
sterile ideals with the creative power of a tested
and assured personality, and give birth to a new
reliance and a new faith. Our heroes anticipate
and provide for our doubts and fears, and fortify
us against the sternest assaults of the world. Welove our heroes because they have first loved us.
Out of this virtue of love and the clashing of its
clear Spirit with the hard matter of established
things come the sterner virtues. From that con-
79
YOUTH AND LIFE
flict, courage is struck off as youth feels the need
of keeping his flame steady and holding to his own
course, regardless of obstacles or consequences.
Youth needs courage, that salt of the virtues, for
if youth has its false hopes, it has its false depres-
sions. That strange melancholy, when things
seem to lose their substance and the world be-
comes an empty shell, is the reverse shield of the
elation of youth. To face and overcome it is a real
test of the courage of youth. The dash and auda-
city, the daring and self-confidence of youth, are
less fine than this simple courage of optimism.
Youth needs courage, too, when its desires do not
come true, when it meets suspicion or neglect, and
when its growth seems inexorably checked by cir-
cumstance. In these emergencies, the youth usu-
ally plays the stoic. He feels a savage pride in
the thought that circumstance can never rob him
of his integrity, or bring his best self to be de-
pendent on mere change of fortune. Such a cour-
age is a guarantor of youth. It forms a protecting
crust over life and lessens the shock of many con-
tingencies. The only danger is that it may become
too perfect a shell and harden the character. It
is not well for youth to shun the battle. Cour-
age demands exposure to assault.
80
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
And besides courage, youth needs temperance.
The sins and excesses of hot-blooded youth are a
byword; youth would not seem to be youth with-
out its carnality and extravagance. It is fortunate
that youth is able to expend that extravagance
partly in idealism. Love is always the antidote to
sensuality. And we can always, if we set ourselves
resolutely to the task, transmute the lower values
into higher. This, indeed, is the crucial virtue of
youth, and temperance is the seal and evidence of
the transmutation. Temperance in things of the
flesh is ordained not through sentimental reasons,
but on the best of physiological and psychological
motives. Temperance is a virtue because of the
evil consequences to one's self and others which
follow excess of indulgence in appetite.
But this temperance does not mean quite the
same thing as the rigid self-control that used to be
preached. The new morality has a more positive
ideal than the rigid mastery which self-control
implies. We are to fix our attention more in giving
our good impulses full play than in checking the
bad. The theory is that if one is occupied with
healthy ideas and activities, there will be no room
or time for the expression of the imhealthy ones.
Anything that implies an inhibition or struggle to
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YOUTH AND LIFE
repress is a draining away into a negative channel
of energy that might make for positive construct-
ive work in the character. The repressed desires
and interests are not killed, but merely checked,
and they persist, with unabated vigor, in strug-
gling to get the upper hand again. They are little
weakened by lying dormant, and lurk warily
below, ready to swarm up again on deck, when-
ever there is the smallest lapse of vigilance. But
if they are neglected they gradually cease from
troubling, and are killed by oblivion where they
could not have been hurt by forcible repression.
The mortification of the flesh seems too often
simply to strengthen its pride.
In the realm of emotion, the dangers of rigid
self-control are particularly evident. There are
fashions in emotion as well as in dress, and it
seems to have become the fashion In certain circles
of youth to inhibit any emotional expression of
the sincere or the serious. There is a sort of reign
of terrorism which prevents personal conversation
from being carried on upon any plane except one
of flippancy and insincerity. Frankness of expres-
sion in regard to personal feelings and likes and
dislikes is tabooed. A strange new ethics of tact
has grown up which makes candor so sacrilegious
82
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
a thing that its appearance in a group or between
two young p|eople of the opposite sex creates gen-
eral havoc and consternation. Young people whodare to give natural expression to their feelings
about each other or about their ideals and out-
look on life find themselves genuinely unpopular.
When this peculiar ethics works at its worst, it
gives a person a pride in concealing his or her
feelings on any of the vital and sincere aspects
of life, the interests and admirations and tastes.
But this energy, dammed up thus from expression
in its natural way, overflows in a hysterical ad-
miration for, the trivial, and an unhealthy interest
in the mere externals, the "safe" things, of life.
Such self-control dwarfs the spirit; it results only
in misunderstandings and a tragic ignorance of
life. It is one of the realest of the vices of youth,
for it is the parent of a host of minor ailments of
the soul. It seems to do little good even to repress
hatred and malice. If repressed, they keep knock-
ing at the door of consciousness, and poison the
virtues that might develop if the soul could only
get rid of its load of spleen. If the character is
thickly sown with impersonal interests and the
positive virtues are carefully cultivated, there
will be no opportunity for these hateful weeds to
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YOUTH AND LIFE
reach the sun and air. Virtue should actually
crowd out vice, and temperance is the tool that
youth finds ready to its hand. Temperance means
the happy harmonizing and coordinating of the
expression of one's personality; it means health,
candor, sincerity, and wisdom, — knowledge of
one's self and the sympathetic understanding
of comrades.
Justice is a virtue which, if it be not developed
in youth, has little chance of ever being devel-
oped. It depends on a peculiarly sensitive reac-
tion to good and evil, and it is only in youth that
those reactions are keen and disinterested. Real
justice is always a sign of great innocence; it can-
not exist side by side with interested motives or
a trace of self-seeking. And a sense of justice is
hard to develop in this great industrial world
where the relations of men are so out of joint and
where such flaunting anomalies assail one at every
turn. Yet in the midst of it all youth is still pure
of heart, and it is only the pure of heart who can
be just. For in youth we live in a world of clean
disinterestedness. We have ambitions and desires,
but not yet have we learned the devious way by
which they may be realized. We have not learned
how to achieve our ends by taking advantage of
84
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
other people, and using them and their interests
and necessities as means. We still believe in the
possibility of every man's realizing himself side
by side with us. In early youth, therefore, we
have an instinctive and almost unconscious sense
of justice. Not yet have we learned the trick of
exploiting our fellow men. If we are early assailed
with the reality of social disorder, and have
brought home to our hearts the maladjustments
of our present order, that sense of justice is trans-
formed into a passion. This passion for social
justice is one of the most splendid of the ideals
of youth. It has the power of keeping alive all
the other virtues; it stimulates life and gives it
a new meaning and tone. It furnishes the leit-
motiv which is so sadly lacking in many lives.
And youth must find a leit-motiv of some kind, or
its spirit perishes. This social idealism acts like
a tonic upon the whole life; it keeps youth alive
even after one has grown older in years.
With justice comes the virtue of democracy.
We learn all too early in youth the undemocratic
way of thinking, the divisions and discriminations
which the society around us makes among people.
But youth cannot be swept by love or fired by the
passion for justice without feeling a wild disgust
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YOUTH AND LIFE
at everything that suggests artificial inequaHties
and distinctions. Democracy means a belief that
people are worthy; it means trust in the good faith
and the dignity of the average man. The chief
reason \v:hy the average man is not now worthy
of more trust, the democrat believes, is simply
that he has not been trusted enough in the past.
Democracy has little use for philanthropy, at least
in the sense of a kindly caring for people, with the
constant recognition that the person who is kind
is superior to the person who is being done good
to. The spirit of democracy is a much more robust
humanity. It is rough and aggressive; it stands
people up on their own feet, makes them take up
their beds and walk. It prods them to move their
own limbs and take care of themselves. It makes
them strong by giving them something to do. It
will have nothing more to do with the supersti-
tion of trusteeship which paralyzes now most
of our institutional life. It does not believe for a
minute that everybody needs guardians for most
of the serious concerns of life. The great crime of
the past has been that humankind has never been
willing to trust itself, or men each other. We have
tied ourselves up with laws and traditions, and
devised a thousand ways to prevent men from
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VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
being thrown on their own responsibility and
cultivating their own powers. Our society has
been constituted on the principle that men must
be saved from themselves. We have surrounded
ourselves with so many moral hedges, have im-
posed upon ourselves so many checks and bal-
ances, that life has been smothered. Our libera-
tion has just begun. We are far from free, but the
new spirit of democracy is the angel that wUl free
us. No virtue is more potent for youth.
And the last of these virtues, redolent of the old
Greek time* when men walked boldly, when the
world was still young, and gods and nymphs not
all dead, is wisdom. To be wise is simply to have
blended and harmonized one's experience, to have
fused it together into a "philosophy of life."
Wisdom is a matter not of quantity, but of quality
of experience. It means getting at the heart of it,
and obtaining the same clear warm impression of
its meaning that the artist does of the aesthetic
idea that he is going to represent. Wisdom in
youth or early middle life may be far truer than in
later life. One's courage may weaken under re-
peated failure, one's sense of justice be dulled by
contact with the wrong relations between men
and classes, one's belief in democracy destroyed
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YOUTH AND LIFE
by the seeming failure of experiments. But this
gathering cynicism does not mean the acquiring
of wisdom, but the losing of it. The usefulness
and practicability of these virtues of youth are
not really vitiated by the struggles they have in
carrying themselves through into practice; what is
exhibited is merely the toughness of the old forces
of prejudice and tradition, and the "pig-headed-
ness" of the old philosophy of timorousness and
distrust. True wisdom is faith in love, in justice,
in democracy; youth has this faith in largest
measure; therefore youth is most wise.
Middle age steals upon a youth almost before
he is aware. He will recognize it at first, perhaps,
by a slight paling of his enthusiasms, or by a sud-
den consciousness that his early interests have
been submerged in the flood of routine work and
family cares. The later years of youth and the
early years of middle life are in truth the danger-
ous age, for then may be lost the virtues that
were acquired in youth. Or, if not lost, many will
be felt to be superfluous. There is danger that the
peculiar bias of the relish of right and wrong that
the virtues of youth have given one may be
weakened, and the soul spread itself too thin over
life. Now one of the chief virtues of middle life is
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VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
to conserve the values of youth, to practice in
sober earnest the virtues that came so naturally
in the enthusiasm of youth, but which take on a
different hue when exposed to what seem to be the
crass facts of the workaday world. But there is
no reason why work, ambition, the raising of a
family, should dull the essential spirit of youth-
ful idealism. It may not be so irrepressible, so
freakish, so intolerant, but it should not be diflFer-
ent in quality and significance. The burdens of
middle life are not a warrant for the releasing of
the spiritual obligations of youth. They do not
give one the right to lookback with amused regret
to the dear follies of the past. For as soon as the
spirit of youth begins to leave the soul, that soul
begins to die. Middle-aged people are too much
inclined to speak of youth as a sort of spiritual
play. They forget that youth feels that it itself has
the serious business of life, the real crises to meet.
To youth it is middle age that seems trivial and
playful. It is after the serious work of love-mak-
ing and establishing one's self in economic inde-
pendence is over that one can rest and play. Youth
has little time for that sort of recreation. In mid-
dle age, most of the problems have been solved,
the obstacles overcome. There is a slackening of
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YOUTH AND LIFE
the lines, a satisfied taking of one's reward. And
to youth this must always seem a tragedy, that
the season of life when the powers are at their
highest should be the season when they are
_oftener turned to material than to spiritual ends.
Youth has the energy and ideals, but not the van-
tage-ground of prestige from which to fight for
them. Middle age has the prestige and the power,
but too seldom the will to use it for the further-
ance of its ideals. Youth has the isolation, the in-
dependence, the disinterestedness so that it mayattack any foe, but it has not the reserve force to
carry that attack through. Middle age has all the
reserve power necessary, but is handicapped by
family obligations, by business and political ties,
so that its power is rarely eflfective for social or
individual progress.
The supreme virtue of middle age will be, then,
to make this diflScult fusion, — to combine devo-
tion to one's family, to one's chosen work, with
devotion to the finer idealism and impersonal aims
that formed one's philosophy of youth. To keep
alive through all the twistings and turnings of
life's road the sense of a larger humanity that
needs spiritual and material succor, of the indi-
vidual spiritual life of ideal interests, is a task of
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VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
virtue that will tax the resources of any man or
woman. Yet here lies the true virtue of middle
age,—to use its splendid powers to enhance the
social and individual life round one, to radiate
influence that transforms and elevates. The se-
cret of such a radiant personality seems to be that
one, while mingling freely in the stress of every-
day life, sees all its details in the light of larger
principles, against the background of their social
meaning. In other words, it is a virtue of middle
life to be socially self-conscious. And this spirit
is the best protector against the ravages of the
tough material world. Only by this social con-
sciousness can that toughness be softened. The
image of the world the way it ought to be must
never be lost sight of in the picture of the world
the way it is.
This conservation of the spirit is even more
necessary for the woman than for the man. The
active life of the latter makes it fairly certain
that he, while he may become hard and callous,
will at least retain some sort of grip on the world's
bigger movements. There is no such certainty for
the mother. Indeed, she seems often to take a real
pleasure in voluntarily offering up in sacrifice at
the time of marriage what few ideal interests and
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YOUTH AND LIFE
tastes she has. The spectacle of the young mother
devoting all her time and strength to her child-
ren and husband, and surrendering all other in-
terests to the interests of the home, is usually
considered inspiring and attractive, especially by
the men. Not so attractive is she thirty years
later, when, her family cares having lapsed and
her children scattered, she is left high and dry in
the world. If she then takes a well-earned rest, it
seems a pity that that rest should be so generally
futile and uninteresting. Without interests and
tastes, and with no longer any useful function in
society, she is relegated to the most trivial amuse-
ments and pursuits. Idle and vapid, she finds
nothing to do but fritter awayher time. The result
is a really appalling waste of economic and social
energy in middle age. Now it is the virtue of this
season of life to avoid all this. The woman as
well as the man must realize that her home is not
bounded by the walls of the house, that it has
wider implications, leading out into all the in-
terests of the community and the state. That
women of this age have not yet learned to be good
mothers and good citizens at the same time, does
not show that it is impossible, but that it is a
virtue that requires more resolution than our mo-
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
rality has been willing to exhibit. The relish of
right and wrong must be a relish of social right
and wrong as well as of individual.
As middle age passes on into old age, however,
one earns a certain right of relaxation. If there
is no right to let go the sympathy for the virtues
of youth and the conservation of its spirit, there
comes the right to give over some of the aggressive
activity. To youth belongs the practical action.
At no other age is there the same impulse and
daring. The virtue of later middle age is to en-
courage and support, rather than actively engage.
It is true we have never learned this lesson. Westill surrender to semi-old men the authority to
govern us, think for us, act for us. We endow
them with spiritual as well as practical leadership,
and allow them to strip youth of its opportunities
and powers. We permit them to rule not only their
own but all the generations. If we could be sure
that their rule meant progress, we could trust
them to guide us. But, in these times at least, it
seems to mean nothing so much as a last fight
for a discredited undemocratic philosophy that
modern youth are completely through with. From
this point of view one of the virtues of this middle
season of life will be the imaginative understand-
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YOUTH AND LIFE
ing of youth's purposes and radical ideals. At that
age, one no longer needs the same courage to face
the battles of life; they are already most of them
irrevocably won or lost. There is not the same
claim of temperance; the passions and ambitions
are relaxed. The sense of justice and democracy
will have become a habit or else they will have
been forever lost. Only the need of wisdom re-
mains,— that unworldlywisdom which mellowing
years can bring, which sees through the disturb-
ance and failure of life the truth and eflBcacy of
youth's ideal vision.
Old age is such a triumph that it may almost be
justly relieved of any burden of virtues or duties;
it is so unique and beautiful that the old should
be given the perfect freedom of the moral city.
So splendid a victory is old age over the ma%nforces of disease and weakness and death that one
is tempted to say that its virtue lies simply in
being (dd. Those virtues of youth which grew
out of the crises and temptations, physical and
spiritual, of early life, are no longer relevant.
There may come instead the quieter virtues of
contentment and renunciation. Old people have
few crises and few temptations; they live in the
past and not in the future, as youth does. They94
VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
cannot be required, therefore, to have that scorn
for tradition which is the virtue of youth. Theycan keep alive for us the tradition that is vital,
and from them we can learn many things.
The value of their experience to us is not that it
teaches us to avoid their mistakes, for; we must
try all things for oursdves. The older generation,
it is true, often flatters itself that its mistakes
somehow make for our benefit, because we learn
from their errors to avoid the pitfalls into which
they came. But there is no making mistakes by
the proxy of a former generation. The world has
moved on in the mean time; the pitfalls are new,
and we shall only entangle ourselves the more by
adopting the methods of our ancestors in getting
out of the diflSculties. But the value of an old
man's experience is that he has preserved in it the
living tradition and hands down to us old hon-
esties, old sincerities, and old graces, that have
been crushed in the rough-and-tumble of modern
life. It is not tradition in itself that is dangerous,
but only dead tradition that has no meaning for
the present and is a mere weight on our pro-
gress. Such is the legal and economic tradition
given to us by our raucous, middle-aged leaders
of opinion, adopted by them through motives of
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YOUTH AND LIFE
present gain, and not through sincere love of the
past.
But old men, looking back over the times in
which they have lived, throw a poetic glamour
over the past and make it live again. They see it
idealized, but it is the real that they see idealized.
An old man of personality and charm has the
faculty of cutting away from the past the dead
wood, and preserving for us the living tissue which
we can graft profitably on our own growing pre-
sent. Oldmen have much of the disinterestedness
of youth; they have no ulterior motive in giving us
the philosophy of their past. The wisest of them
instinctively select what is vital for our present
nourishment. It is not old men that youth has to
fear, but the semi-old, who have lost touch with
their youth, and have not lived long enough to
get the disinterested vision of their idealized past.
But old men who have lived this life of radical
virtue are the best of teachers; they distill the
perfume of the past, and bring it to us to sweeten
our present. Such men grow old only in body.
The radical spirit of youth has the power of abol-
ishing considerations of age; the body changes,
but the spirit remains the same. In this sense, it
is the virtue of old age not to become old.
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VIRTUES AND SEASONS OF LIFE
The besetting sin of this season of life is apathy.
Old age should not be a mere waiting for death.
The fact that we cannot reconcile death with life
shows that they ought not to be discussed in the
same terms. They belong to two different orders.
Death has no part in life, and in life there can be
no such thing as preparation for death. An oldmanlives to his appointed time, and then his life ends;
but the life up to that ending, barring the loss of
his faculties, has been all life and not a whit death.
Old men do not fear death as much as do young
men, and this calmness is not so much a result
of disillusionment with life as a recognition that
their life has been lived, their work finished, the
cycle of their activity rounded off. One virtue
of old age, then, is to live as fully at the height of
one's powers as strength will permit, passing out
of life serene and unreluctant, with willingness to
live and yet with willingness to die. To know an
old man who has grown old slowly, taking the
seasons as they came, conserving the spirit of his
youthful virtues, mellowing his philosophy of life,
acquiring a clearer, saner, and more beautiful out-
look on human nature and all its spiritual values
with each passing year, is an education in the vir-
tues of life. The virtues which produce an old age
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YOUTH AND LIFE
such as this do not cut across the grain of life, but
enhance and conserve the vital impulses and
forces. Such an old age is the crowning evidence
of the excellent working of the soul. A life needs
no other proof than this that each season has
known its proper virtue and healthful activity.
IV
THE LIFE OF IRONY
IV
THE LIFE OF IRONY
I COULD never, until recently, divest myself of the
haunting feeling that being ironical had some-
thing to do with the entering of the iron into one's
soul. I thought I knew what irony was, and I
admired it immensely. I could not believe that
there was something metallic and bitter about it.
Yet this sinister connotation of a clanging, rasp-
ing meanness of spirit, which I am sure it has
still in many people's minds, clung about it, until
one happy day my dictionary told me that the
iron had never entered into the soul at all, but the
soul into the iron (St. Jerome had read the psalm
wrong), and that irony was Greek, with all the
free, happy play of the Greek spirit about it, let-
ting in fresh air and light into others' minds and
our own. It was to the Greek an incomparable
method of intercourse, the rub of mind against
mind by the simple use of simulated ignorance
and the adoption, without committing one's self,
of another's point of view. Not until I read the
Socrates of Plato did I fully appreciate that this
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YOUTH AND LIFE
irony, — this pleasant challenging of the world,
this insistent judging of experience, this sense of
vivid contrasts and incongruities, of comic juxta-
positions, of flaring brilliancies, and no less heart-
breaking impossibilities, of all the little parts of
one's world being constantly set oflf against each
other, and made intelligible only by being trans-
lated into and defined in each others' terms,—that this was a life, and a life of beauty, that one
might suddenly discover one's self living all un-
awares. And if one could judge one's own feeble
reflection, it was a life that had no room for iron
within its soul.
We should speak not of the Socratic method but
of the Socratic life. For irony is a life rather than
a method. A life cannot be taken off and put on
again at will; a method can. To be sure, some
people talk of life exactly as if it were some port-
able commodity, or some exchangeable garment.
We must live, they cry, as. if we were about to
begin. And perhaps they are. Only some of us
would rather die than live that puny life that they
can adopt and cover themselves with. Irony is
too rich and precious a thing to be capable of such
transmission. The ironist is born and not made.
This critical attitude towards life, this delicious
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THE LIFE OF IRONY
sense of contrasts that we call irony, is not a pose
or an amusement. It is something that colors
every idea and every feeling of the man who is so
happy as to be endowed with it.
Most people will tell you, I suppose, that the
religious conviction of salvation is the only per-
manently satisfying coloring of life. In the splen-
did ironists, however, one sees a sweeter, more
flexible and human principle of life, adequate,
without the buttress of supernatural belief, to
nourish and fortify the spirit. In the classic iron-
ist of all time, irony shows an inherent nobility, a
nobility that all ages have compared favorably
with the Christian ideal. Lacking the spur of relig-
ious emotion, the sweetness of irony may be more
difficult to maintain than the mood of belief. But
may it not for that veryreason be judged superior,
for is it not written. He that endureth unto the
end shall be saved?
It is not easy to explain the quality of that rich-
est and most satisfying background of life. It lies,
I think, in a vivid and intense feeling of aliveness
which it gives. Experience comes to the ironist
in little darts or spurts, with the added sense of
contrast. Most men, I am afraid, see each bit of
personal experience as a unit, strung more or less
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YOUTH AND LIFE
loosely on a string of other mildly related bits.
But the man with the ironical temperament is
forced constantly to compare and contrast his
experience with what was, or what might be, or
with what ought to be, and it is the shocks of these
comparisons and contrasts that make up his inner
life. He thinks he leads a richer life, because he
feels not only the individual bits but the contrasts
besides in all their various shadings and tints.
To this sense of impingement of facts upon life is
due a large part of this vividness of irony; and the
rest is due to the alertness of the ironical mind.
The ironist is always critically awake. He is al-
ways judging, and watching with inexhaustible
interest, in order that he may judge. Now irony
in its best sense is an exquisite sense of proportion,
a sort of spiritual tact in judging the values and
significances of experience. This sense of being
spiritually alive which ceaseless criticism of the
world we live in gives us, combined with the sense
of power which free and untrammeled judging
produces in us, is the background of irony. Andit should be a means to the truest goodness.
Socrates made one mistake,— knowledge is not
goodness. But it is a step towards judging, and
good judgment is the true goodness. For it is on
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THE LIFE OF IRONY
judgment impelled by desire that we act. Theclearer and cleaner our judgments then, the moredefinite and correlated our actions. And the great
value of these judgments of irony is that they
are not artificial but spring naturally out of life.
Irony, the science of comparative experience,
compares things not with an established standard
but with each other, and the values that slowly
emerge from the process, values that emerge from
one's own vivid reactions, are constantly revised,
corrected, and refined by that same sense of con-
trast. The ironic life is a life keenly alert, keenly
sensitive, reacting promptly with feelings of lik-
ing or dislike to each bit of experience, letting
none of it pass without interpretation and assimi-
lation, a life full and satisfying,— indeed a rival
of the religious life.
The life of irony has the virtues of the religious
life without its defects. It expresses the aggres-
sive virtues without the quiescence of resignation.
For the ironist has the courageous spirit, the
sympathetic heart and the understanding mind,
and can give them full play, unhampered by the
searching introspection of the religious mind that
often weakens rather than ennobles and fortifies.
He is at one with the religious man in that he hates
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YOUTH AND LIFE
apathy and stagnation, for they mean death. But
he is superior in that he attacks apathy of intellect
and personality as well as apathy of emotion. Hehas a great conviction of the significance of all life,
the lack of which conviction is the most sadden-
ing feature of the religious temperament. The
religious man pretends that every aspect of life
has meaning for him, but in practice he constantly
minimizes the noisier and vivider elements. He is
essentially an aristocrat in his interpretation of
values, while the ironist is incorrigibly a demo-
crat. Religion gives a man an intimacy with a few
selected and rarified virtues and moods, while
irony makes him a friend of the poor and lowly
among spiritual things. When the religious manis healing and helping, it is at the expense of his
spiritual comfort; he must tear himself away from
his companions and go out grimly and sacrificingly
into the struggle. The ironist, living his days
among the humbler things, feels no such severe
call to service. And yet the ironist, since he has no
citadel of truth to defend, is reallythemore adven-
turous. Life, fiot fixed in predestined formulas or
measurable by fixed, immutable standards, is
fluid, rich and exciting. To the ironist it is both
discovery and creation. His courage seeks out
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THE LIFE OF IRONY
the obscure places of human personality, and his
sympathy and understanding create new interests
and enthusiasms in the other minds upon which
they play. And these new interests in turn react
upon his own life, discovering imexpected vistas
there, and creating new insight into the world that
he lives in. That democratic, sympathetic outlook
upon the feelings and thoughts and actions of
men and women is the life of irony.
That life is expressed in the social intercourse
of ourselves with others. The daily fabric of the
life of irony is woven out of our critical commun-
ings with ourselves and the personalities of our
friend, and the people with whom we come in con-
tact. The ironist, by adopting another's point of
view and making it his own in order to carry light
and air into it, literally puts himself in the other
man's place. Irony is thus the truest sympathy.
It is no cheap way of ridiculing an opponent by
putting on his clothes and making fun of him. The
ironist has no opponent, but only a friend. And
in his irony he is helping that friend to reveal him-
self. That half-seriousness, that solemn treatment
of the trivial and trivial treatment of the solemn
which is the pattern of the ironist's talk is but his
way of exhibiting the unexpected contrasts and
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YOUTH AND LIFE
shadings that he sees to be requisite to the keenest
understanding of the situation. The ironist bor-
rows and exchanges and appropriates ideas and
gives them a new setting in juxtaposition with
others, but he never burlesques or caricatures or
exaggerates them. If an idea is absurd, the slight-
est change of environment will show that absurd-
ity. The mere transference of an idea to another's
mouth will bring to light all its hidden mean-
inglessness. It needs no extraneous aid. If an
idea is hollow, it will show itself cowering against
the intellectual background of the ironist like the
puny, shivering thing it is. If a point of view can-
not bear being adopted by another person, if it is
not hardy enough to be transplanted, it has little
right to exist at all. This world is no hothouse for
ideas and attitudes. Too many outworn ideas are
skulking in dark retreats, sequestered from the
light; every man has great sunless stretches in his
soul where base prejudices lurk and flourish. Onthese the white light of irony is needed to play.
And it delights the ironist to watch them shrivel
and decay under that light. The little tabooed
regions of well-bred people, the " things we never
mention," the basic biases and assumptions that
underlie the lives and thinking of every class and108
THE LIFE OF IRONY
profession, our second-hand dogmas and phrases,
— all these live and thrive because they have
never been transplanted, or heard from the lips of
another. The dictum that " the only requisites
for success are honesty and merit," which we ap-
plaud so frantically from the lips of the successful,
becomes a ghastly irony in the mouth of an unem-
ployed workingman. There would be a frightful
mortality of points of view could we have a per-
fectly free exchange such as this. Irony is just
this temporary borrowing and lending. Many of
our cherished ideals would lose half their validity
were they put bodily into the mouths of the less
fortunate. But if irony destroys some ideals it
builds up others. It tests ideals by their social va-
lidity, by their general interchangeability among
all sorts of people and the world, but if it leaves
the foundations of many in a shaky condition and
renders more simply provisional, those that it does
leave standing are imperishably founded in the
common democratic experience of all men.
To the ironist it seems that the irony is not in
the speaking but in the things themselves. He is
a poor ironist who would consciously distort, or
attempt to makeanother's idea appear in any light
except its own. Absurdity is an intrinsic quality
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YOUTH AND LIFE
of so many things that they only have to be
touched to reveal it. The deadliest way to anni-
hilate the unoriginal and the insincere is to let it
speak for itself. Irony is this letting things speak
for themselves and hang themselves by their own
rope. Only, it repeats the words after the speaker,
and adjusts the rope. It is the commanding touch
of a comprehending personality that dissolves the
seemingly tough husk of the idea. The ironical
method might be compared to the acid that devel-
ops a photographic plate. It does not distort the
image, but merely brings clearly to the light all
that was implicit in the plate before. And if it
brings the picture tothe light with values reversed,
so does irony revel in a paradox, which is simply a
photographic negative of the truth, truth with the
values reversed. But turn the negative ever so
slightly so that the light falls upon it, and the
perfect picture appears in all its true values and
beauty. Irony, we may say then, is the photo-
graphy of the soul. The picture goes through cer-
tain changes in the hands of the ironist, but with-
out these changes the truth would be simply a
blank, unmeaning surface. The photograph is a
synonym for deadly accuracy. Similarly the iron-
ist insists always on seeing things as they are. He110
THE LIFE OF IRONY
is a realist, whom the grim satisfaction of seeing
the truth compensates for any sordidness that it
may bring along with it. Things as they are,
thrown against the background of things as they
ought to be, — this is the ironist's vision. I should
like to feel that the vision of the religious man is
not too often things as they are, thrown against
the background of things as they ought not to be.
The ironist is the only man who makes any
serious attempt to distinguish between fresh and
second-hand experience. Our minds are so unfor-
tunately arranged that all sorts of beliefs can be
accepted and propagated quite independently of
any rational or even experimental basis at all.
Nature does not seem to care very much whether
our ideas are true or not, as long as we get on
through life safely enough. And it is surprising
on what an enormous amount of error we can get
along comfortably. We cannot be wrong on every
point or we should cease to live, but so long as we
are empirically right in our habits, the truth or
falsity of our ideas seems to have little efifect upon
our comfort. We are born into a world that is an
inexhaustible store of ready-made ideas, stored up
in tradition, in books, and in every medium of
communication between our minds and others.
Ill
YOUTH AND LIFE
All we have to do is to accept this predigested
nourishment, and ask no questions. We could
live a whole life without ever making a really
individual response, without providing ourselves
out of our own experience with any of the material
that our mind works on. Many of us seem to be
just this kind of spiritual parasites. We may learn
and absorb and grow, up to a certain point. But
eventually something captures us: we become
encased in a suit of armor, and invulnerable to our
own experience. We have lost the faculty of being
surprised. It is this encasing that the ironist fears,
and it is the ironical method that he finds the best
for preventing it. Irony keeps the waters in mo-
tion, so that the ice never has a chance to form.
The cut-and-dried life is easy to form because it
has no sense of contrast; everything comes to one
on its own terms, vouching for itself, and is ac-
cepted or rejected on its own good looks, and not
for its fitness and place in the scheme of things.
This is the courage and this the sympathy of
irony. Have they not a beauty of their own com-
parable in excellence with the paler glow of relig-
ious virtue? And the understanding of the ironist
although aggressive and challenging has its justi-
fication, too. For he is mad to understand the
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THE LIFE OF IRONY
world, to get to the bottom of other personalities.
That is the reason for his constant classification.
The ironist is the most dogmatic of persons. Tounderstand you he must grasp you firmly, or he
must pin you down definitely; if he accidentally
nails you fast to a dogma that you indignantly
repudiate, you must blame his enthusiasm and not
his method. Dogmatism is rarely popular, and
the ironist of course suffers. It hurts people's eyes
to see a strong light, and the pleasant mist-land of
ideas is much more emotionally warming than
the clear, sunny region of transmissible phrases.
How the average person wriggles and squirms
under these piercing attempts to corner his per-
sonality! "Tell me what you mean!" or "Whatdo you see in it? " are the fatal questions that the
ironist puts, and who shall censure him if he does
display the least trace of malicious delight as he
watches the half-formed baby ideas struggle
towards the light, or scurry around frantically to
find some decent costume in which they may ap-
pear in public?
The judgments of the ironist are often dis-
counted as being too sweeping. But he has a valid
defense. Lack of classification is annihilation of
thought. Even the newest philosophy will admit
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YOUTH AND LIFE
that classification is a necessary evil. Concepts
are indispensable,— and yet each concept falsi-
fies. The ironist must have as large a stock as
possible, but he must have a stock. And even the
unjust classification is marvelously effective. The
ironist's name for his opponent is a challenge to
him. The more sweeping it is, the more stimulus it
gives him to repel the charge. He must explain
just how he is imique and individual in his atti-
tude. And in this explanation he reveals and dis-
covers all that the ironist wishes to know about
him. A handful of epithets is thus the ammuni-
tion of the ironist. He must call things by what
seem to him to be their right names. In a sense,
the ironist assumes the prisoner to be guilty until
he proves himself innocent; but it is always in
order that justice may be done, and that he maycome to learn the prisoner's soul and all the won-
drous things that are contained there.
It is this passion for comprehension that ex-
plains the ironist's apparently scandalous pro-
pensity to publicity. Nothing seems to him too
sacred to touch, nothing too holy for him to be-
come witty about. There are no doors locked to
him, there is nothing that can make good any
claim of resistance to scrutiny. His free and easy
114
THE LIFE OF IRONY
manner of including everything within the sweep
of his vision is but his recognition, however, of
the fact that nothing is really so serious as wethink it is, and nothing quite so petty. Theironist will descend in a moment from a discussion
of religion to a squabble over a card-game, and he
will defend himself with the reflection that relig-
ion is after all a human thing and must be dis-
cussed in the light of everyday living, and that
the card-game is an integral part of life, reveals
the personalities of the players— and his own to
himself— and being worthy of his interest is
worthy of his enthusiasm. The ironist is apt to
test things by their power to interest as much as
by their nobility, and if he sees the incongruous
and inflated in the lofty, so he sees the significant
in the trivial and raises it from its low degree.
Many a mighty impostor does he put down from
his seat. The ironist is the great intellectual dem-
ocrat, in whose presence and before whose law all
ideas and attitudes stand equal. In his world
there is no privileged caste, no aristocracy of sen-
timents to be reverenced, or segregated systems of
interests to be tabooed. Nothing human is alien
to the ironist; the whole world is thrown open
naked to the play of his judgment.
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YOUTH AND LIFE
In the eyes of its detractors, irony has all the
vices of democracy. Its publicity seems mere vul-
garity, its free hospitality seems to shock all ideas
of moral worth. The ironist is but a scoffer, they
say, with weapon leveled eternally. at all that is
good and true and sacred. The adoption of an-
other's point of view seems little better than ma-
licious dissimulation,— the repetition of others'
words, an elaborate mockery; the ironist's eager
interest seems a mere impudence or a lack of finer
instincts; his interest in the trivial, the last confes-
sion of a mean spirit; and his love of classifying,
a proof of his poverty of imaginative resource.
Irony, in other words, is thought to be synonym-
ous with cynicism. But the ironist is no cynic.
His is a kindly, not a sour interest in human
motives. He wants to find out how the humanmachine'runs, not to prove that it is a worthless,
broken-down affair. He accepts it as it comes, and
if he finds it curiously feeble and futile in places,
blame not him but the nature of things. He finds
enough rich compensation in the unexpected
charm that he constantly finds himself eliciting.
The ironist sees life steadily and sees it whole; the
cynic only a distorted fragment.
If the ironist is not cynic, neither is he merely a
116
THE LIFE OF IRONY
dealer in satire, burlesque and ridicule. Irony
may be the raw material, innocent in itself but
capable of being put to evil uses. But it involves
neither the malice of satire, nor the horse-play
of burlesque, nor the stab of ridicule. Irony is in-
finitely finer and more delicate and impersonal.
The satirist is always personal and concrete, but
the ironist deals with general principles, and broad
aspects of human nature. It cannot be too much
emphasized that the function of the ironist is not
to make fun of people, but to give their souls an
airing. The ironist is a judge on the bench, giving
men a public hearing. He is not an aggressive
spirit who goes about seeking whom he may de-
vour, or a spiritual lawyer who courts litigation,
but the judge before whom file all the facts of his
experience, the people he meets, the opinions he
hears or reads, his own attitudes and preposses-
sions. If any are convicted they are self-convicted.
The judge himself is passive, merciful, lenient.
There is judgment, but no punishment. Or rather,
the trial itself is the punishment. Now satire is all
that irony is not. The satirist is the aggressive
lawyer, fastening upon particular people and
particular qualities. But irony is no more per-
sonal than the sun that sends his flaming darts
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YOUTH AND LIFE
into the world. The satirist is a purely practical
man, with a business instinct, bent on the main
chance and the definite object. He is often brutal,
and always overbearing; the ironist never. Irony
may wound from the very fineness and delicacy
of its attack, but the wounding is incidental. Thesole purpose of the satirist and the burlesquer is
to wound, and they test their success by the deep-
ness of the wound. But irony tests its own by the
amount of generous light and air it has set flowing
through an idea or a personality, and the broad
significance it has revealed in neglected things.
If irony is not brutal, neither is it merely criti-
cal and destructive. The world has some reason,
it is true, to complain against the rather supercili-
ous judiciousness of the ironist. " Who are you to
judge us.? " it cries. The world does not like to feel
the scrutinizing eyes of the ironist as he sits back
in his chair; does not like to feel that the ironist
is simply studying it and amusing himself at its
expense. It is uneasy, and acts sometimes as if
it did not have a perfectly clear conscience. Tothis uncomfortableness the ironist can retort, —"What is it that you are afraid to have known
about you?" If the judgment amuses him, so
much the worse for the world. But if the idea of
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THE LIFE OF IRONY
the ironist as judge implies that his attitude is
wholly detached, wholly objective, it is an tinfor-
tunate metaphor. For he is as much part and
parcel of the human show as any of the people he
studies. The world is no stage, with the ironist as
audience. His own personal reactions with the
people about him form all the stuff of his thoughts
and judgments. He has a personal interest in the
case; his own personality is inextricably mingled
in the stream of impressions that flows past him.
If the ironist is destructive, it is his own world
that he is destroying; if he is critical, it is his own
world that he is criticizing. And his irony is his
critique of life.
This is the defense of the ironist against the
charge that he has a purely aesthetic attitude
towards life. Too often, perhaps, the sparkling
clarity of his thought, the play of his humor, the
easysense of superiority and intellectual command
that he carries off, make his irony appear as rather
the aesthetic nourishment of his life than an active
way of doing and being. His rather detached air
makes him seem to view people as means, not ends
in themselves. With his delight in the vivid and
poignant he is prone to see picturesqueness in the
sordid, and tolerate evils that he should condemn.
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YOUTH AND LIFE
For all his interest and activity, it is said that he
does not really care. But this aesthetic taint to his
irony is really only skin-deep. The ironist is ironi-
cal not because he does not care, but because he
cares too much. He is feeling the profoundest
depths of the world's great beating, laboring
heart, and his playful attitude towards the grim
and sordid is a necessary relief from the tension of
too much caring. It is his salvation from unut-
terable despair. The terrible urgency of the
reality of poverty and misery and exploitation
would be too strong upon him. Only irony can
give him a sense of proportion, and make his life
fruitful and resolute. It can give him a temporary
escape, a slight momentary reconciliation, a
chance to draw a deep breath of resolve before
plunging into the fight. It is not a palliative so
much as a perspective. This is the only justifica-
tion of the aesthetic attitude, that, if taken provi-
sionally, it sweetens and fortifies. It is only deadly
when adopted as absolute. The kind of aesthetic
irony that Pater and Omar display is a paralyzed,
half-seeing, half-caring reflection on life,— a
tame, domesticated irony with its wings cut, an
irony that furnishes a justification and a com-
mand to inaction. It is the result not of exquis-
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THE LIFE OF IRONY
itely refined feelings, but of social anaesthesia.
Their irony, cut off from the great world of menand women and boys and girls and their intricate
interweavings and jostlings and incongruities,
turns pale and sickly and numb. The ironist has
no right to see beauty in things unless he really
cares. The aesthetic sense is harmless only when
it is both ironical and social.
Irony is thus a cure for both optimism and pes-
simism. Nothing is so revolting to the ironist as
the smiling optimist, who testifies in his fatuous
heedlessness to the desirability of this best of all
possible worlds. But the ironist has always an
incorrigible propensity to see the other side. The
hopeless maladjustment of too many people to
their world, of their bondage in the iron fetters
of circumstance,— all this is too glaring for the
ironist's placidity. When he examines the beauti-
ful picture, too often the best turns worst to him.
But if optimism is impossible to the ironist, so is
pessimism. The ironist may have a secret re-
spect for the pessimist,— he at least has felt the
bitter tang of life, and has really cared,— but he
feels that the pessimist lacks. For if the optim-
ist is blind, the pessimist is hypnotized. He is
abnormally suggestive to evil. But clear-sighted
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YOUTH AND LIFE
irony sees that the world is too big and multifari-
ous to be evil at heart. Something beautiful and
joyous lurks even in the most hapless, — a child's
laugh in a dreary street, a smile on the face of a
weary woman. It is this saving quality of irony
that both optimist and pessimist miss. And since
plain common sense tells us that things are never
quite so bad or quite so good as they seem, the
ironist carries conviction into the hearts of men in
their best moments.
The ironist is a person who counts in the world.
He has all sorts of unexpected effects on both the
people he goes with and himself. His is an insist-
ent personality; he is as troublesome as a mis-
sionary. And he is a missionary; for, his own pur-
pose being a comprehension of his fellows' souls,
he makes them conscious of their own souls. He is
a hard man; he will take nothing on reputation;
he will guarantee for himselfthe qualities of things.
He will not accept the vouchers of the world that
a man is wise, or clever, or sincere, behind the im-
penetrable veil of his face. He must probe until he
elicits the evidence of personality, until he gets
at the peculiar quality which distinguishes that
individual soul. For the ironist is after all a con-
noisseur in personality, and if his conversation
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THE LIFE OF IRONY
partakes too often of the character of cross-ex-
amination, it is pnly as a lover of the beautiful,
a possessor of taste, that he inquires. He does not
want to see people squirm, but he does want to
see whether they are alive or not. If he pricks too
hard, it is not from malice, but merely from error
in his estimation of the toughness of their skins.
What people are inside is the most interesting
question in the world to the ironist. And in find-
ing out he stirs them up. Many a petty doubting
spirit does he challenge and bully into a sort of
self-respect. And many a bag of wind does he
puncture. But his most useful function is this
of stimulating thought and action. The ironist
forces his friends to move their rusty limbs and
unhinge the creaking doors of their minds. The
world needs more ironists. Shut up with one's
own thoughts, one loses the glow of life that comes
from frank exchange of ideas with many kinds of
people. Too many minds are stuffy, dusty rooms
into which the windows have never been opened,
— minds heavy with their own crotchets, clut-
tered up with untested theories and conflicting
sympathies that have never got related in any
social way. The ironist blows them all helter-
skelter, sweeps away the dust, and sets everything
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in its proper place again. Your solid, self-respect-
ful mind, the ironist confesses, he can do little
with; it is not of his world. He comes to freshen
and tone up the stale minds. The ironist is the
great purger and cleanser of life. Irony is a sort
of spiritual massage, rubbing the souls of men.
It may seem rough to some tender souls, but it
does not sere or scar them. The strong arm of the
ironist restores the circulation, and drives away
anaemia.
On the ironist himself the effect of irony is even
more invigorating. We can never really under-
stand ourselves without at least a touch of irony.
The interpretation of human nature without is a
simple matter in comparison with the comprehen-
sion of that complex of elations and disgusts,
inhibitions and curious irrational impulses that we
caU ourselves. It is not true that by examining
ourselves and coming to an understanding of the
way we behave we understand other people, but
that by the contrasts and little revelations of our
friends we learn to interpret ourselves. Intro-
spection is no match for irony as a guide. Themost
illuminating experience that we can have is a
sudden realization that had we been in the other
person's place we should have acted precisely as
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THE LIFE OF IRONY
he did. To the ironist this is no mere intellectual
conviction that, after all, none of us are perfect,
but a vivid emotional experience which has knit
him with that other person in one moment in a
bond of sympathy that could have been acquired
in no other way. Those minds that lack the touch
of irony are too little flexible, or too heavily but-
tressed with self-esteem to make this sudden
change of attitudes. The ironist, one might almost
say, gets his brotherhood intuitively, feels the
sympathy and the oneness in truth before he
thinks them. The ironist is the only man whoreally gets outside of himself. What he does for
other people, — that is, picking out a little piece
of their souls and holding it up for their inspec-
tion,— he does for himself. He gets thus an
objective view of himself. The unhealthy indoor
brooding of introspection is artificial and unpro-
ductive, because it has no perspective or contrast.
But the ironist with his constant outdoor look
sees his own foibles and humiliations in the light
of those of other people. He acquires a more tol-
erant, half-amused, half-earnest attitude toward
himself. His self-respect is nourished by the
knowledge that whatever things discreditable and
foolish and worthless he has done, he has seen
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YOUTH AND LIFE
them approximated by others, and yet his esteem
is kept safely pruned down by the recurring evi-
dence that nothing he has is unique. He is poised
in life, ready to soar or to walk as the occasion
demands. He is pivoted, susceptible to every
stimulus, and yet chained so that he cannot be
flung off into space by his own centrifugal force.
Irony has the same sweetening and freshening
effect on one's own life that it has on the lives of
those who come in contact with it. It gives one a
command of one's resources. The ironist prac-
tices a perfect economy of material. For he must
utilize his wealth constantly and over and over
again in various shapes and shadings. He may be
poor in actual material, but out of the contrast
and arrangement of that slender store he is able,
like a kaleidoscope, to make a multifarious variety
of wonderful patterns. His current coin is, so to
speak, kept bright by constant exchange. He is
infinitely richer than your opulent but miserly
minds that hoard up facts, and are impotent from
the very plethora of their accumulations.
Irony is essential to any real honesty. For dis-
honesty is at bottom simply an attempt to save
somebody's face. But the ironist does not want
any faces saved, neither his own nor those of other
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THE LIFE OF IRONY
people. To save faces is to sophisticate humannature, to falsify the facts, and miss a delicious
contrast, an illuminating revelation of how people
act. So the ironist is the only perfectly honest
man. But he suffers for it by acquiring a reputa-
tion for impudence. His willingness to bear the
consequences of his own acts, his quiet insistence
that others shall bear consequences, seem like
mere shamelessness, a lack of delicate feeling for
" situations." But accustomed as he is to range
freely and know no fear nor favor, he despises this
reserve as a species of timidity or even hypocrisy.
It is an irony itself that the one temperament
that can be said really to appreciate human na-
ture, in the sense of understanding it rightly,
should be called impudent, and it is another that
it should be denounced as monstrously egotistical.
The ironical mind is the only truly modest mind,
for its point of view is ever outside itself. If it
calls attention to itself, it is only as another of
those fascinating human creatures that pass ever
by with their bewildering, alluring ways. If it
talks about itself, it is only as a third person in
whom all the talkers are supposed to be eagerly
interested. In this sense the ironist has lost his
egotism completely. He has rubbed out the line
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that separates his personality from the rest of the
world.
The ironist must take people very seriously, to
spend so much time over them. He must be both
serious and sincere or he would not persist in his
irony and expose himself to so much misunder-
standing. And since it is not how people treat
him, but simply how they act, that furnishes the
basis for his appreciation, the ironist finds it easy
to forgive. He has a way of letting the individual
offense slide, in favor of a deeper principle. In
the act of being grossly misrepresented, he can
feel a pang of exasperated delight that people
should be so dense; in the act of being taken in,
he can feel the cleverness of it all. He becomes for
the moment his enemy; and we can always forgive
ourselves. Even while he is being insulted, or
outraged or ignored, he can feel, "After all, this is
what life is ! This is the way we poor human crea-
tures behave!" The ironist is thus in a sense
vicarious human nature. Through that deep, an-
ticipatory sympathy, he is kept clean from hate or
scorn.
The ironist therefore has a valid defense against
all the charges of brutality and triviality and
irreverence, that the religious man is prone to
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THE LIFE OF IRONY
bring against him. He can care more deeply about
things because he can see so much more widely.
And he can take life very seriously because it
interests him so intensely. And he can feel its
poignancy and its flux more keenly because he
delivers himself up bravely to its swirling, many-
hued current. The inner peace of religion seems
gained only at the expense of the reality of living.
A life such as the life of irony, lived fully and
joyously, cannot be peaceful; it cannot even be
happy, in the sense of calm content and satisfac-
tion. But it can be better than either— it can be
wise, and it can be fruitful. And it can be good,
in a way that the life of inner peace cannot be.
For the life of irony having no reserve and weav-
ing itself out of the flux of experience rather than
out of eternal values has the broad, honest sym-
pathy of democracy, that is impossible to any
temperament with the aristocratic taint. One
advantage the religious life has is a salvation in
another world to which it can withdraw. The life
of irony has laid up few treasures in heaven, but
many in this world. Having gained so much it has
much to lose. But its glory is that it can lose
nothing unless it lose all.
To shafts of fortune and blows of friends or
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enemies then, the ironist is almost impregnable.
He knows how to parry each thrust and prepare
for every emergency. Even if the arrows reach
him, all the poison has been sucked out of them by
his clear, resolute understanding of their signifi-
cance. There is but one weak spot in his armor,
but one disaster that he fears more almost than
the loss of his life, — a shrinkage of his environ-
ment, a running dry of experience. He fears to be
cut oflf from friends and crowds and human faces
and speech and books, for he demands to be
ceaselessly fed. Like a modern city, he is totally
dependent on a steady flow of supplies from the
outside world, and will be in danger of starvation,
if the lines of communication are interrupted.
Without people and opinions for his mind to play
on, his irony withers and faints. He has not the
faculty of brooding; he cannot mine the depths of
his own soul, and bring forth after labor mighty
nuggets of thought. The flow and swirl of things
is his compelling interest. His thoughts are re-
actions, immediate and vivid, to his daily experi-
ence. Some deep, unconscious brooding must go
on, to produce that happy precision of judgment
of his; but it is not voluntary. He is conscious
only of the shifting light and play of life; his
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THE LIFE OF IRONY
world is dynamic, energetic, changing. He lives
in a world of relations, and he must have a whole
store of things to be related. He has lost himself
completely in this world he lives in. His ironical
interpretation of the world is his life, and this
world is his nourishment. Take away this envi-
ronmental world and you have slain his soul. Heis invulnerable to everything except that depriva-
tion.
V
THE EXCITEMENT OP FRIENDSHIP
V
THE EXCITEMENT OF FRIENDSHIP
My friends, I can say with truth, since I have no
other treasure, are my fortune. I really live only
when I am with my friends. Those sufficient per-
sons who can pass happily long periods of solitude
communing with their own thoughts and nourish-
ing their own souls fill me with a despairing ad-
miration. Their gift of auto-stimulation argues a
personal power which I shall never possess. Or
else it argues, as I like to think in self-defense,
a callousness of spirit, an insensitiveness to the
outside influences which nourish and sustain the
more susceptible mind. And those persons who
can shut themselves up for long periods and work
out their thoughts alone, constructing beautiful
and orderly representations of their own spirits,
are to me a continual mystery. I know this is the
way that things are accomplished, that "monot-
ony and solitude" are necessary for him who
would produce creative thought. Yet, knowing
well this truth, I shun them both. I am a battery
that needs to be often recharged. I require the ex-
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YOUTH AND LIFE
citement of friendship; I must have the constant
stimulation of friends. I do not spark automati-
cally, but must have other minds to rub up
against, and strike from them by friction the
spark that will kindle my thoughts.
When I walk, I must have a friend to talk to, or
I shall not even think. I am not of those who, like
Stevenson, believe that walking should be a kind
of vegetative stupor, where the sun and air merely
fill one with a diflEused sense of well-being and
exclude definite thought. The wind should rather
blow through the dusty regions of the mind, and
the sun light up its dark comers, and thinking and
talking should be saner and higher and more joy-
ful than within doors. But one must have a friend
along to open the windows. Neither can I sym-
pathize with those persons who carry on long
chains of reasoning while they are traveling or
walking. When alone, my thinking is as desultory
as the scenery of the roadside, and when with a
friend, it is apt to be as full of romantic surprises
as a walk through a woodland glen. Goodtalk is
like good scenery— continuous yet constantly
varying, and full of the charm of novelty and
surprise. How unnatural it is to think except
when one is forced to do it, is discovered when one
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iTHE EXCITEMENT OF FRIENDSHIP
attempts to analyze one's thoughts when alone.
He is a rare genius who finds something beyond
the mere visual images that float through his
mind,— either the reflection of what he is actu-
ally seeing, or the pictorial representations of
what he has been doing or what he wants or in-
tends to do in the near or far future. We should
be shocked to confess to ourselves how little con-
trol we have over our own minds; we shall be
lucky if we can believe that we guide them.
Thinking, then, was given us for use in emer-
gencies, and no man can be justly blamed if he
reserves it for emergencies. He can be blamed,
however, if he does not expose himself to those
crises which will call it forth. Now a friend is such
an emergency, perhaps the most exciting stimulus
to thinking that one can find, and if one wants to
live beyond the vegetative stupor, one must sur-
round one's self with friends. I shall call myfriends, then, all those influences which warm meand start running again all my currents of thought
and imagination. The persons, causes, and books
that unlock the prison of my intellectual torpor, I
can justly call my friends, for I find that I feel
toward them all the same eager joy and inexhaust-
ible rush of welcome. Where they differ it shall
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YOUTH AND LIFE
be in degree and not in kind. The speaker whomI hear, the book that I read, the friend with
whom I chat, the music that I play, even the
blank paper before me, which subtly stirs me to
cover it with sentences that unfold surprisingly
and entice me to follow until I seem hopelessly
lost from the trail,— all these shall be my friends
as long as I find myself responding to them, and
no longer. They are all alike in being emergencies
that call upon me for instant and definite response.
The diflference between them lies in their re-
sponse to me. My personal friends react upon me;
the lecturers and books arid music and pictures do
not. These are not influenced by my feelings or
by what I do. I can approach them cautiously or
boldly, respond to them slowly or warmly, and
they will not care. They have a definite quality,
and do not change; if I respond differently to
them at different times, I know that it is I and not
they who have altered. The excitement of friend-
ship does not lie with them. One feels this lack
particularly in reading, which no amount of en-
thusiasm can make more than a feeble and spirit-
less performance. The more enthusiasm the read-
ing inspires in one, the more one rebels at the
passivity into which one is forced. I want to get
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THE EXCITEMENT OF FRIENDSHIP
somehow at grips with the book. I can feel the
warmth of the personality behind it, but I cannot
see the face as I can the face of a person, lighting
and changing with the iridescent play of expres-
sion. It is better with music; one can get at grips
with one's piano, and feel the resistance and the
response of the music one plays. One gets the
sense of aiding somehow in its creation, the lack of
which feeling is the fatal weakness of reading,
though itself the easiest and most universal of
friendly stimulations. One comes from much
reading with a sense of depression and a vague
feeling of something unsatisfied; from friends or
music one comes with a high sense of elation and
of the brimming adequacy of life.
If one could only retain those moments! What
a tragedy it is that our periods of stimulated
thinking should be so diflBcult of reproduction;
that there is no intellectual shorthand to take
down the keen thoughts, the trains of argument,
the pregnant thoughts, which spring so spon-
taneously to the mind at such times! What a.
tragedy that one must wait till the fire has died
out, till the light has faded away, to transcribe
the dull flickering remembrances of those golden
hours when thought and feeling seemed to have
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YOUTH AND LIFE
melted together, and one said and thought what
seemed truest and finest and niost worthy of
one's immortalizing! This is what constitutes
the hopeless labor of writing,— that one must
struggle constantly to warm again the thoughts
that are cold or have been utterly consumed.
What was thought in the hours of stimulation
must be written in the hours of solitude, when the
mind is apt to be cold and gray, and when one is
fortunate to find on the hearth of the memory
even a few scattered embers lying about. The
blood runs sluggish as one sits down to write.
What worry and striving it takes to get it running
freely again! What labor to reproduce even a
semblance of what seemed to come so genially and
naturally in the contact and intercourse of
friendship!
One of the curious superstitions of friendship
is that we somehow choose our friends. To the
connoisseur in friendship no idea could be more
amazing and incredible. Ouir friends are chosen
for us by some hidden law of sympathy, and not
by our conscious wills. All we know is that in our
reactions to people we are attracted to some and
are indifferent to others. And the ground of this
mutual interest seems based on no discoverable
140
THE EXCITEMENT OF FRIENDSHIP
principles of similarity of temperament or charac-
ter. We have no time, when meeting a new per-
son, to study him or her carefully; our reactions
are swift and immediate. Our minds are made up
instantly,— "friend or non-friend." By some
subtle intuitions, we know and have measured at
their first words all the possibilities which their
friendship has in store for us. We get the full qual-
ity of their personality at the first shock of meet-
ing, and no future intimacy changes that quality.
If I am to like a man, I like him at once; further
acquaintance can only broaden and deepen that
liking and understanding. If I am destined to
respond, I respond at once or never. If I do not
respond, he continues to be to me as if I had
never met him; he does not exist in my world.
His thoughts, feelings, and interests I can but
dimly conceive of; if I do think of him it is only
as a member of some general class. My imagina-
tive sympathy can embrace him only as a type.
If his interests are in some way forced upon myattention, and my imagination is compelled to
encompass him as an individual, I find his ideas
and interests appearing like pale, shadowy things,
dim ghosts of the real world that my friends and
I live in.
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YOUTH AND LIFE
Association with such aliens— and how much
of our Hfe is necessarily spent in their company—is a torture far worse than being actually dis-
liked. Probably they do not dislike us, but there
is this strange gulf which cuts us oflf from their
possible sympathy. A pall seems to hang over our
spirits; our souls are dumb. It is a struggle and
an effort to affect them at all. And though we
may know that this depressing weight which
seems to press on us in our intercourse with them
has no existence, yet this realization does not cure
our helplessness. We do not exist for them any
more thdn they exist for us. They are depressants,
not stimulators as are our friends. Our words
sound singularly futile and half-hearted as they
pass ovu" lips. Our thoughts turn to ashes as we
utter them. In the grip of this predestined anti-
pathy we can do nothing but submit and pass on.
But in how different alight do we see our
friends! They are no types, but each a unique,
exhaustless personality, with his own absorbing
little cosmos of interests roimd him. And those
interests are real and vital, and in some way inter-
woven with one's own cosmos. Our friends are
those whose worlds overlap our own, like inter-
secting' circles. If there is too much overlapping,
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THE EXCITEMENT OF FRIENDSHIP
however, there is monotony and a mutual cancel-
lation. It is, perhaps, a question of attitude as
much as anything. Our friends must be pointed
in the same direction in which we are going, and
the truest friendship and delight is when we can
watch e^ch other's attitude toward life grow
increasingly similar; or if not similar, at least so
sympathetic as to be mutually complementary
and sustaining.
The wholesale expatriation from our world of
all who do not overlap us or look at life in a simi-
lar direction is so fatal to success that we cannot
afford to let these subtle forces of friendship and
apathy have full sway with our souls. To be at
the mercy of whatever preordained relations mayhave been set up between us and the people we
meet is to make us incapable of negotiating busi-
ness in a world where one must be all things to all
men. From an early age, therefore, we work,
instinctively or consciously, to get our reactions
under control, so as to direct them in the way
most profitable to us. By a slow and impercept-
ible accretion of impersonality over the erratic
tendencies of personal response and feeling, we
acquire the professional manner, which opens the
world wide to us. We become human patterns of
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YOUTH AND LIFE
the profession into which we have fallen, and are
no longer individual personalities. Men find no
difficulty in becoming soon so professionalized
that their manner to their children at home is
almost identical with that to their clients in the
office. Such an extinction of the persoftality is a
costly price to pay for worldly success. One has
integrated one's character, perhaps, but at the
cost of the zest and verve and peril of true
friendship.
To those of us, then, who have not been
tempted by success, or who have been so fortu-
nate as to escape it, friendship is a life-long adven-
ture. We do not integrate ourselves, and we have
as many sides to our character as we have friends
to show them to. Quite unconsciously I find my-
self witty with one friend, large and magnanimous
with another, petulant and stingy with another,
wise and grave with another, and utterly frivolous
with another. I watch with surprise the sudden
and startling changes in myself as I pass from the
influence of one friend to the influence of some
one else. But my character with each particular
friend is constant. I find myself, whenever I
meet him, with much the same emotional and
mental tone. If we talk, there is with each one
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THE EXCITEMENT OF FRIENDSHIP
some definite subject upon which we always speak
and which remains perennially fresh and new. If
I am so unfortunate as to stray accidentally from
one of these well-worn fields into another, I aminstantly reminded of the fact by the strangeness
and chill of the atmosphere. We are happy only
on our familiar levels, but on these we feel that we
could go on exhaustless forever, without a pang of
ennui. And this inexhaustibility of talk is the
truest evidence of good friendship.
Friends do not, on the other hand, always talk
of what is nearest to them. Friendship requires
that there be an open channel between friends,
but it does not demand that that channel be the
deepest in our nature. It may be of the shallowest
kind and yet the friendship be of the truest. For
all the different traits of our nature must get their
airing through friends, the trivial as well as the
significant. We let ourselves out piecemeal, it
seems, so that only with a host of varied friends
can we express ourselves to the fullest. Each
friend calls out some particular trait in us, and it
requires the whole chorus fitly to teach us what
we are. This is the imperative need of friendship.
A man with few friends is only half-developed;
there are whole sides of his nature which are
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YOUTH AND LIFE
locked up and have never been expressed. Hecannot unlock them himself, he cannot even dis-
cover them; friends alone can stimulate him and
open them. Such a man is in prison; his soul is in
penal solitude. A man must get friends as he
would get food and drink for nourishment and
sustenance. And he must keep them, as he would
keep health and wealth, as the infallible safe-
guards against misery and poverty of spirit.
If it seems selfish to insist so urgently upon
one's need for'friends, if it should be asked what
we are giving our friends in return for all their
spiritual fortification and nourishment, the de-
fense would have to be, that we give back to
them in ample measure what they give to us. If
we are their friends, we are stimulating them as
they are stimulating us. They will find that they
talk with unusual brilliancy when they are with
us. And we may find that we have, perhaps,
merely listened to them. Yet through that curi-
ous bond of sympathy which has made us friends,
we have done as much for them as if we had
exerted ourselves in the most active way. Theonly duty of friendship is that we and our friends
should live at our highest and best when together.
Having achieved that, we have fulfilled the law.
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THE EXCITEMENT OF FRIENDSHIP
A good friendship, strange to say, has little
place for mutual consolations and ministrations.
Friendship breathes a more rugged air. In sorrow
the silent pressure of the hand speaks the emo-
tions, and lesser griefs and misfortunes are ig-
nored or glossed over. The fatal facility of wo-
men's friendships, their copious outpourings of
grief to each other, their sharing of wounds and
sufferings, their half-pleased interest in misfor-
tune, — all this seems of a lesser order than the
robust friendships of men, who console each other
in a much more subtle, even intuitive way, — by
a constant pervading sympathy which is felt
rather than expressed. For the true atmosphere
of friendship is a sunny one. Griefs and disap-
pointments do not thrive in its clear, healthy
light. When they do appear, they take on a new
color. The silver lining appears, and we see even
our own personal mistakes and chagrins as whim-
sical adventures. It is almost impossible seri-
ously to believe in one's bad luck or failures or
incapacity while one is talking with a friend. One
achieves a sort of transfiguration of personality in
those moments. In the midst of the high and
genial flow of intimate talk, a pang may seize one
at the thought of the next day's drudgery, when
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YOUTH AND LIFE
life will be lived alone again; but nothing can dis-
pel the ease and fullness with which it is being
Uved at the moment. It is, indeed, a heavy care
that will not dissolve into misty air at the magic
touch of a friend's voice.
Fine as friendship is, there is nothing irrevo-
cable about it. The bonds of friendship are not
iron bonds, proof agaiast the strongest of strains
and the heaviest of assaults. A man by becoming
your friend has not committed himself to all the
demands which you may be pleased to make upon
him. Foolish people like to test the bonds of their
friendships, pulling upon them to see how much
strain they will stand. When they snap, it is as if
friendship itself had been proved imworthy. But
the truth is that good friendships are fragile
things and require as much care in handling as
any other fragile and precious things. For friend-
ship is an adventure and a romance, and in ad-
ventures it is the unexpected that happens. It is
the zest of peril that makes the excitement of
friendship. All that is unpleasant and unfavor-
able is foreign to its atmosphere; there is no place
in friendship for harsh criticism or fault-finding.
We will "take less" from a friend than we will
from one who is indifferent to us.
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THE EXCITEMENT OF FRIENDSHIP
Good friendship is lived on a warm, impetuous
plane; the long-suffering kind of friendship is a
feeble and, at best, a half-hearted affair. It is
friendship in the valley and not on the breezy
heights. For the secret of friendship is a mutual
admiration, and it is the realization or suspicion
that that admiration is lessening on one side or the
other that swiftly breaks the charm. Now this
admiration must have in it no taint of adulation,
which will wreck a friendship as soon as suspicion
will. But it must consist of the conviction, subtly
expressed in every tone of the voice, that each
has found in the other friend a rare spirit, com-
pounded of light and intelligence and charm. Andthere must be no open expression of this feeling,
but only the silent flattery, soft and almost im-
perceptible.
And in the best of friendships this feeling is
equal on both sides. Too great a superiority in
our friend disturbs the balance, and casts a sort of
artificial light on the talk and intercourse. Wewant to believe that we are fairly equal to our
friends in power and capacity, and that if they
excel us in one trait, we have some counterbalanc-
ing quality in another direction. It is the reverse
side of this shield that gives point to the diabolical
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YOUTH AND LIFE
insight of the Frenchman who remarked that we
were never heartbroken by the misfortunes of our
best friends. If we have had misfortunes, it is not
wholly unjust and unfortunate that our friends
should suffer too. Only their misfortunes must
not be worse than ours. For the equilibrium is
then destroyed, and our serious alarm and sym-
pathy aroused. Similarly we rejoice in the good
fortune of our friends, always provided that it be
not too dazzling or too undeserved.
It is these aspects of friendship, which cannot
be sneered away by the reproach of jealousy, that
make friendship a precarious and adventurous
thing. But it is precious in proportion to its pre-
cariousness, and its littlenesses are but the symp-
toms of how much friends care, and how sensitive
they are to all the secret bonds and influences that
unite them.
Since our friends have all become woven into
our very selves, to part from friends is to lose, in a
measure, one's self. He is a brave and hardy soul
who can retain his personality after his friends are
gone. And since each friend is the key which un-
locks an aspect of one's own personality, to lose a
friend is to cut away a part of one's self. I maymake another friend to replace the loss, but the
150
THE EXCITEMENT OF FRIENDSHIP
unique quality of the first friend can never be
brought back. He leaves a wound which heals
only gradually. To have him go away is as bad as
to have him pass to another world. The letter is
so miserable a travesty on the personal presence,
a thin ghost of the thought of the once-present
friend. It is as satisfactory as a whiflf of stale
tobacco smoke to the lover of smoking.
Those persons and things, then, that inspire us
to do our best, that make us live at our best, when
we are in their presence, that call forth from us our
latent and unsuspected personality, that nourish
and support that personality, — those are our
friends. The reflection of their glow makes bright
the darker and quieter hours when they are not
with us. They are a true part of our widest self;
we should hardly have a self without them. Their
world is one where chagrin and failure do not
enter. Like the sun-dial, they "only mark the
shining hours."
VI
THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE
VI
THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE
That life is an adventure it needs nothing more
than the wonder of our being in the world and
the precariousness of our stay in it to inform us.
Although we are, perhaps, as the scientists tell
us, mere inert accompaniments of certain bundles
of organized matter, we tend incorrigibly to think
of ourselves as unique personalities. And as we let
our imagination roam over the world and dwell
on the infinite variety of scenes and thoughts and
feelings and forms of life, we wonder at the in-
credible marvel that has placed us just here in
this age and country and locality where we were
born. That it should be this particular place and
time and body that my consciousness is illumin-
ating gives, indeed, the thrill of wonder and ad-
venture to the mere fact of my becoming and
being.
And as life goes on, the feeling for the precari-
ousness of that being grows upon one's mind. The
security of childhood gives place to an awareness
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YOUTH AND LIFE
of the perils of misfortune, disease, and sudden
death which seem to lie in wait for men and seize
them without regard to their choices or deserts.
We are prone, of course, to believe in our personal
luck; it is the helplessness of others around us
rather that impresses us, as we see both friends
and strangers visited with the most dreadful
evils, and with an impartiality of treatment that
gradually tends to force upon us the conviction
that we, too, are not immune. At some stage in
our life, oftenest perhaps when the first flush of
youth is past, we are suddenly thrown into a sus-
picion of life, a dread ofnamelessand unforeseeable
ill, and a sober realization of the need of circum-
spection and defense. We discover that we live in
a world where almost anything is likely to happen.
Shocking accidents that cut men off in their
prime, pain and suffering falling upon the just
and the unjust, maladjustments and misunder-
standings that poison and ruin lives,— all these
things are daily occurrences in our experience,
either of personal knowledge or out of that wider
experience of our reading.
Religion seems to give little consolation in the
face of such incontrovertible facts. For no belief
in Providence can gainsay the seeming fact that
156
THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE
we are living in a world that is run without regard
to the health and prosperity of its inhabitants.
Whatever its ulterior meanings, they do not seem
to be adjusted to our scale of values. Physical
law we can see, but where are the workings of a
moral law? If they are present, they seem to cut
woefully against the grain of the best desires and
feelings of men. Evil seems to be out of all pro-
portion to the ability of its sufferers to bear it, or
of its chastening and corrective efficacy. Our feel-
ings are too sensitive for the assaults which the
world makes upon them. If the responsibility for
making all things work together for his good is
laid entirely upon man, it is a burden too heavy
for his weakness and ignorance to bear. And thus
we contemplate the old, old problem of evil. And
in its contemplation, the adventure of life, which
should be a tonic and a spur, becomes a depres-
sant; instead of nerving, it intimidates, and makes
.
us walk cautiously and sadly through life, where
we should ride fast and shout for joy.
In these modern days, the very wealth of our
experience overwhelms us, and makes life harder
to live in the sight of evil. The broadening of com-
munication, giving us a connection through news-
papers and magazines with the whole world, has
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YOUTH AND LIFE
made our experience almost as wide as the world.
In that experience, however, we get all the world's
horrors as well as its interests and delights. Thus
has it been that this widening, which has meant
the possibility of living the contemplative and
imaginative life on an infinitely higher plane than
before, has meant also a soul-sickness to the
more sensitive, because of the immense and over-
burdening drafts on their sympathy which the
new experience involved. Although our increased
knowledge of the world has meant everywhere
reform, and has vastly improved and beautified
life for millions of men, it has at the same time
opened a nerve the pain of which no opiate has
been able to soothe. And along with the real
increase of longevity and sounder health for
civilized man, attained through the triumphs of
medical science, there has come a renewed real-
ization of the shortness and precariousness, at its
best, of life. The fact that our knowledge of evil
is shared by millions of men intensifies, I think,
our sensitiveness. Through the genius of display
writers, thousands of readers are enabled to be
present imaginatively at scenes of horror. Thesubtle sense of a vast concourse having witnessed
the scene magnifies its potency to the individual
158
THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE
mind, and gives it the morbid touch as of crowds
witnessing an execution.
Our forefathers were more fortunate, and could
contemplate evil more philosophically and object-
ively. Their experience was happily limited to
what the normal soul could endure. Their evil
was confined to their vicinity. What dim intelli-
gence of foreign disaster and misery leaked in,
only served to purify and sober their spirits. Evil
did not then reverberate around the world as it
does now. Their nerves were not strained or made
raw by the reiterations and expatiations on far-
away pestilence and famine, gigantic sea disasters,
wanton murders, or even the shocking living con-
ditions of the great city slums. Their imagina-
tions had opportunity to grow healthily, imassailed
by the morbidities of distant evil, which seems
magnified and ominous through its very strange-
ness. They were not forced constantly to ask
themselves the question, "What kind of a world
do we live in anyhow.'' Has it no mercy and no
hope? " They were not having constantly thrown
up to them a justification of the universe. Per-
haps it was because they were more concerned
with personal sin than with objective evil. The
enormity of sin against their Maker blotted out
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YOUTH AND LIFE
all transient misfortune and death. But it was
more likely that the actual ignorance of that evil
permitted their personal flagrancies to loom up
larger in their sight. Whatever the cause, there
was a difference. We have only to compare their
literature— solid, complacent, rational— with
our restless and hectic stuff; or contrast their
portraits— well-nourished, self-respecting faces
— with the cheap or callous or hunted faces that
we see about us to-day, to get the change in spir-
itual fibre which this opening of the world has
wrought. It has been a real eating of the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil. A social con-
science has been born. An expansion of soul has
been forced upon us. We have the double need
of a broader vision to assimilate the good that is
revealed to us, and a stronger courage to bear
the evil with which our slowly-bettering old world
still seems to reek.
But the youth of this modern generation are
coming more and more to see that the gloom and
hysteria of this restless age, with all the other
seemingly neurotic symptoms of decay, are sim-
ply growing-pains. They signify a better spirit-
ual health that is to "be. The soul is now learning
to adjust itself to the new conditions, to embrace
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THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE
the wide world that is its heritage, and not to reel
and stagger before the assaults of a malign power.
Life will always be fraught with real peril, but it
is peril which gives us the sense of adventure.
And as we gain in our command over the re-
sources, both material and spiritual, of the world,
we shall see the adventure as not so much the
peril of evil as an opportunity of permanent
achievement. We can only cure our suffering
from the evil in the world by doing all in our
power to wipe out that which is caused by human
blundering, and prevent what we can prevent by
our control of the forces of nature. Our own little
personal evils we can dismiss with little thought.
Such as have come to us we can endure, — for
have we not already endured them?— and those
that we dread we shall not keep away by fear or
worry. We can easily become as much slaves to
precaution as we can to fear. Although we can
never rivet our fortune so tight as to make it im-
pregnable, we may by our excessive prudence
squeeze out of the life that we are guarding so
anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes
it worth living. In the light of our own problem-
atical misfortune, we must rather live freely and
easUy, taking the ordinary chances and looking
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YOUTH AND LIFE
To-morrow confidently in the face as we have
looked To-day. I have come thus far safely and
well; why may I not come farther?
But in regard to the evil that we see around us,
the problem is more difficult. Though the youth
of this generation hope to conquer, the battle is
still on. We have fought our way to a knowledge
of things as they are, and we must now fight
our way beyond it. That first fight was our first
sense of the adventure of life. Our purpose early
became to track the world relentlessly down to
its lair. We were resolute to find out the facts,
no matter how sinister and barren they proved
themselves to be. We would make no compro-
mises with our desires, or with those weak persons
who could not endure the clear light of reality.
We were scornful in the presence of the supersti-
tions of our elders. We could not conceive that
sufficient knowledge combiaed with action would
not be able to solve all our problems and makeclear all our path. As our knowledge grew, so did
our courage. We pressed more eagerly on the
trail of this world of ours, purposing to capture
and tame its mysteries, and reveal it as it is, so
that none could doubt us. As we penetrated
farther, however, iato the cave, the path became162
THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE
more and more uncertain. We discovered our
prey to be far grimmer and more dangerous than
we had ever imagined. As he turned slowly at
bay, we discovered that he was not only repuls-
ive but threatening. We were sternly prepared
to accept him just as we found him, exulting that
we should know things as they really were. Wewere ready for the worst, and yet somehow not
for this worst. We had not imagined him retal-
iating upon us. In our first recoil, the thought
flashed upon us that our tracking him to his lair
might end in his feasting on our bones.
It is somewhat thus that we feel when the full
implications of the materialism to which we have
laboriously fought our way dawn upon us, or we
realize the full weight of the sodden social misery
around us. Hitherto we have been so intent on the
trail that we have not stopped to consider what
it all meant. Now that we know, not only our
own salvation seems threatened, but that of all
around us, even the integrity of the world itself.
In thesemoments of perplexity and alarm, we lose
confidence in ourselves and all our values and in-
terpretations. To go further seems to be to court
despair. We are ashamed to retreat, and, besides,
have come too far ever to get back into the safe
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plain of ignorance again. The world seems to be
revealed to us as mechanical in its workings and
fortuitous in its origin, and the warmth and light
of beauty and ideals that we have known all along
to be our true life seem to be proven illusions.
And the wailing of the world comes up to us, cast
off from any divine assistance, left to the mercy of
its own weak wills and puny strengths. In this
fall, our world itself seems to have lost merit, and
we feel ourselves almost degraded by being a part
of it. We have suddenly been deprived of our
souls; the world seems to have beaten us in our
first real battle with it.
Now this despair is partly the result of an ex-
cessive responsibility that we have taken for the
universe. In youth, if we are earnest and eager,
we tend to take every bit of experience that comes
to us, as either a justification or a condemnation
of the world. We are all instinctive monists at
that age, and crave a complete whole. As we un-
consciously construct our philosophy of life, each
fact gets automatically recorded as confirming or
denying the competency of the world we live in.
Even the first shock of disillusionment, which
banishes those dreams of a beautiful, orderly,
and rational world that had suffused childhood
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with their golden light, did not shatter the con-
viction that there was somehow at least a Lord's
side. The sudden closing of the account in the
second shock, when the world turns on us, shows
us how mighty has been the issue at stake,
—
nothing less than our faith in the universe, and,
perhaps, in the last resort, of our faith in our-
selves. We see now that our breathless seriousness
of youth was all along simply a studying of our
crowded experience to see whether it was on the
Lord's side or not. And now in our doubt we are
left with a weight on our souls which is not our
own, a burden which we have really usurped.
In its adventure with evil, youth must not
allow this strange, metaphysical responsibility to
depress and incapacitate it. We shall never face
life freely and bravely and worthily if we do. I
may wonder, it is true, as I look out on these
peaceful fields, with the warm sun and blue sky
above me and the kindly faces of my good friends
around me, how this can be the same world that
houses the millions of poor and wretched people
in their burning and huddled quarters in the city.
Can these days, in which I am free to come and
go and walk and study as I will, be the same that
measure out the long hours of drudgery to thous-
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YOUTH AND LIFE
ands of youth amid the whir of machines, and
these long restful nights of mine, the same that
are for them only gasps breaking a long mono-
tony? It must be the same world, however,
whether we can ever reconcile ourselves to it or
not. But we need plainly feel no responsibility
for what happened previously to our generation.
Our responsibility now is a collective, a social re-
sponsibility. And it is only for the evil that so-
ciety might prevent were it organized wisely and
justly. Beyond that it does not go. For the acci-
dental evil that is showered upon the world, we
are not responsible, and we need not feel either
that the integrity of the universe is necessarily
compromised by it. It is necessary to be some-
what self-centred in considering it. We must
trust our own feelings rather than any rational
proof. In spite of everything, the world seems to
us so unconquerably good, it affords so many sat-
isfactions, and is so rich in beauty and kindliness,
that we have a right to assume that there is a side
of things that we miss in our pessimistic contem-
plation of misfortune and disaster. We see only
the outer rind of it. People usually seem to be so
much happier than we can find any very rational
excuse for their being, and that old world that
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confronted us and scared us may look very muchworse than it really is. And we can remember that
adding to the number of the sufferers does not
intensify the actual quality of the suffering. There
is no more suffering than one person can bear.
These considerations may allay a little our first
terror and despair. When we really understand
that the world is not damned by the evil in it,
we shall be ready to see it in its true light as a
challenge to our heroisms. Not how evil came
into the world, but how we are going to get it out,
becomes the problem. Not by brooding over the
hopeless, but by laying plans for the possible will
we shoulder our true responsibility. We shall
find then that we had no need of despair. Wewere on the right track. When the world that we
were tracking down turned at bay, he threatened
more than he was able to perform. Not less sci-
ence but more science do we need in order that we
may more and more get into our control the forces
and properties of nature, and guide them for our
benefit. But we must learn that the interpreta-
tion of the world lies not in its mechanism but in
its meanings, and those meanings we find in our
values and ideals, which are very real to us. Sci-
ence brings us only to an "area of our dweUiag,"
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YOUTH AND LIFE
as Whitman says. The moral adventure of the
rising generation will be to learn this truth thor-
oughly, and to reinstate ideals and personality at
the heart of the world.
Our most favorable battle-ground against evil
will for some time at least be the social movement.
Poverty and sin and social injustice we must feel
not sentimentally nor so much a symptom of a
guilty conscience as a call to coSperate with the
exploited and sufferers in throwing off their ills.
Sensitiveness to evil will be most fruitful when it
rouses a youth to the practical encouragement of
the imder-men to save themselves. Youth to-day
needs to "beat the gong of revolt." The op-
pressed seldom ask for our sympathy, and this is
right and fitting; for they do not need it. (It
might even make them contented with their lot.)
What they need is the inspiration and the know-
ledge to come into their own. All we can ever do
in the way of good to people is to encourage them
to do good to themselves. "Who would be free,
himself must strike the blow !
" This is the social
responsibility of modem youth. It must not seek
to serve humanity so much as to rouse and teach
it. The great moral adventure that lies still ahead
of us is to call men to the expansion of their souls
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THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE
to the wide world which has suddenly been re-
vealed to them.
Perhaps with that expansion youth will finally
effect a reconciliation with life of those two su-
premest and most poignant of adventures: the
thoughts that cluster around sex, and the fears and
hopes that cluster around death, the one the gate-
way into life, the other out of it. Youth finds them
the two hardest aspects of life to adjust with the
rest of the world in which we live. They are ever-
present and pervasive, and yet their manifest-
ations always cause us surprise, and shock us
as of something unwonted intruding in our daily
affairs. They are the unseen spectres behind life,
of which we are always dimly conscious, but
which we are always afraid to meet boldly and
face to face. We speak of them furtively, or in
far-away poetical strains. They are the materials
for the tragedies of life, of its pathos and wistful-
ness, of its splendors and defeats. Yet they are
treated always with an incorrigible and dishonest
delicacy. The world, youth soon finds, is a much
less orderly and refined place than would appear
on the surface of our daily intercourse and words.
As we put on our best clothes to appear in public,
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YOUTH AND LIFE
so the world puts on its best clothes to appear in
talk and print.
Men ignore death, as if they were quite uncon-
scious that it would sometime come to them, yet
who knows how many pensive or terrible moments
the thought gives them? But the spectre is quite
invisible to us. Or if they have passions, and re-
spond as sensitively as a vibrating string to sex
influences and appeals, we have little indication
of that throbbing life behind the impenetrable
veil of their countenances. We can know what
people think about all other things, even what
they think about God, but what they think of
these two adventures of sex and death we never
know. It is not so much, I am willing to believe,
shame or fear that keeps us from making a parade
of them, as awe and wonder and baffled endeavors
to get our attitude towards them into expressible
form. They are too elemental, too vast and over-
powering'in their workings to fit neatly into this
busy, accounted-for, and tied-down world of daily
life. They are superfluous to what we see as the
higher meanings of this our life, and irritate us
by their clamorous insistence and disregard for
the main currents of our living. They seem irre-
levant to life; or rather they overtop its bounty.
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Their pressure to be let in is offensive, and taints
and mars irrevocably what would otherwise be
so pleasant and secure a life. That is, perhaps,
why we call manifestations of sex activity, ob-
scene, and of death, morbid and ghastly.
In these modern days we are adopting a health-
ier attitude, especially towards sex. Perhaps the
rising generation will be successful in reconciling
them both, and working them into our lives, where
they may be seen in their right relations and pro-
portions, and no longer the pleasure of sex and the
peace of death seem an illegitimate obtrusion into
life. To get command of these arch-enemies is
an endeavor worthy of the moral heroes of to-
day. We can get control, it seems, of the rest of
our souls, but these always lie in wait to torment
and harass us. To tame this obsession of sex and
the fear of death will be a Herculean task for
youth in the adventure of life. Perhaps some will
succeed where we have failed. For usually when
we try to tame sex, it poisons the air around us,
and if we try to tame the fear of death by resign-
ing ourselves to its inevitability, we find that we
have not tamed it but only drugged it. At certain
times, however, our struggles with the winged
demons which they send into our minds may con-
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stitute the most poignant incidents in our adven-
ture of life, and add a beauty to our lives. Where
they do not make for happiness, they may at
least make for a deepening of knowledge and ap-
preciation of life. Along through middle life, we
shall find, perhaps, that, even if untamed, they
have become our allies, and that both have lost
their sting and their victory,— sex diffusing our
life with a new beauty, and death with a cour-
ageous trend towards a larger life of which we shall
be an integral part.
When we have acclimated ourselves to youth,
suddenly death looms up as the greatest of dan-
gers in our adventure of life. It puzzles and
shocks and saddens us by its irrevocability and
mystery. Thatwe shouldbetaken out of this world
to which we are so perfectly adapted, and which
we enjoy and feel intimate with, is an incredible
thing. Even if we believe that we shall survive
death, we know that that after-life must perforce
be lived outside of this our familiar world. Reason
tellsus that we shall be annihilated,and yetwe can-
not conceive our own annihilation. We can easier
imagine the time before our birth, when we were
not, than the time after our death, when we
shall not be. Old men find nothing very dreadful
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in the thought of being no more, and we shall find
that it is the combined notion of being annihilated,
and yet of being somehow conscious of that anni-
hilation, that terrifies us, and startles our minds
sometimes in the dead of night when our spirits
are sluggish and the ghoulish ideas that haunt
the dimmest chambers of the mind are flitting
abroad. We can reason with ourselves that if weare annihilated we shall not be conscious of it, and
if we are consciouswe shall not be annihilated, but
this easy proof does not help us much in a prac-
tical way. We simply do not know, arid all specu-
lations seem to be equally legitimate. If we are
destined to assume another form of life, no divin-
ation can prophesy for us what that life shall be.
On the face of it the soul as well as the body
dies. The fate of the body we know, and it seems
dreadful enough to chill the stoutest heart; and
what we call our souls seem so intimately depend-
ent upon these bodies as to be incapable of living
alone. And yet somehow it is hard to stop be-
lieving in the independent soul. We can believe
that the warmth dissipates, that the chemical
and electrical energies of the body pass into other
forms and are gradually lost in the immensity of
the universe. But this wonder of consciousness,
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which seems to hold and embrace all our thoughts
and feelings and bind them together, what can we
know of its power and permanence? In our own
limited sphere it already transcends space and
time, our imaginations triumphing over space,
and our memories and anticipations over time:
this magic power of the imagination, which tran-
scends our feeble experience and gives ideas and
images which have not appeared directly throtigh
the senses. We can connect this conscious life
with no other aspect of the world nor can we ex-
plain it by any of the principles which we apply
to physical things. It is the divine gift that re-
veals this world; why may it not reveal sometime
a far wider universe?
It is this incalculability of our conscious life
that makes its seeming end so great an adventure.
This Time which rushes past us, blotting out
everything it creates, leaving us ever suspended
on a Present, which, as we turn to look at it, has
melted away,—how are we to comprehend it ? The
thin, fragile and uncertain stream of our memoryseems insufficient to give any satisfaction of per-
manence. I like to think of a world-memory that
retains the past. Physical things that change or
perish continue to live psychically in memory;174
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why may not all that passes, not only in our
minds, but unknown to us, be carried along in
a great world-mind of whose nature we get a
dim inkling even now in certain latent mental
powers of ours which are sometimes revealed,
and seem to let down bars into a boundless sea of
knowledge. The world is a great, rushing, irre-
versible life, not predestined in its workings, but
free like ourselves. The accumulating past seems
to cut into the future, and create it as it goes
along. Nothing is then lost, and we, although
we had no existence before we were bom,— how
could we have, since that moving Present had not
created us?— would yet, having been born, con-
tinue to exist in that world-memory. We do not
need to reecho the sadness of the centuries,—"Everything passes; nothing remains !
" For even
if we take this world-memory at its lowest terms
as a social memory, the effects of the deeds of
men, for good or for evil, remain. And their words
remain, the distillation of their thought and
experience. This we know, and we know, more-
over, that "one thing at least is certain," not that
"this life dies " — for that has yet to be proved—but that "the race lives!" Nature is so careless
about the individual life, so careful for the species,
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that it seems as if it were only the latter that
counted, that her only purpose was the eternal
continuation of life. And many to-day find a
satisfaction for their cravings for immortality in
the thought that they will live in their children
and so on immortally as long as their line con-
tinues.
But we have a right to make greater hazards of
faith than this. Might it not be that, although
nature never purposed that the individual soul
should live, man has outwitted her? He has cer-
tainly outwitted her in regard to his bodily life.
There was no provision in nature for man's living
by tillage of the soil and domestication of animals,
or for his dwelliag in houses built with tools in his
hands, or for traveling at lightning speed, or for
harnessing her forces to run for him the machines
that should turn out the luxuries and utilities of
life. All these were pure gratuities, devised by
man and wrested from nature's unwilling hands.
She was satisfied with primitive, animal-like man,
as she is satisfied with him in some parts of the
world to-day. We have simply got ahead of her.
All the other animals are still under her dominion,
but man has become the tool-maker and the par-
tial master of nature herself. Although still far
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from thoroughly taming her, he finds in the inces-
sant struggle his real life purpose, his inspiration,
and his work, and still brighter promises for his
children's children. For the race lives and takes
advantage of all that has been discovered before.
Now, since nature has seemed to care as little
about the continuation of life beyond death as she
has of man's comfort upon earth, might it not be
that, just as we have outwitted her in the physi-
cal sphere and snatched comfort and utility by our
efforts, so we may, by the cultivation of our intel-
ligence and sentiments and whole spiritual life,
outwit her in this realm and snatch an immor-
talitythat she has never contemplated? She never
intended that we should audaciously read her
secrets and speculate upon her nature as we have
done. Who knows whether, by our hardihood in
exploring the uncharted seas of the life of feeling
and thought, we may have over-reached her again
and created a real soul, which we can project
beyond death ? We are provided with the raw
miaterial of our spiritual life in the world, as we are
provided with the raw material to build houses,
and it may be our power and our privilege to build
our immortal souls here on earth, as men have
built and are still building the civilization of this
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YOUTH AND LIFE
world of ours. This would not mean that we
could all attain, any more than that all men have
the creative genius or the good-will for the con-
structive work of civilization; there may be "real
losses and real losers" in the adventure for im-
mortality, but to the stout-hearted and the wise
it will be possible. We shall need, as builders
need the rules of the craft, the aid and counsel of
the spiritually gifted who have gone before us.
It has been no mistake that we have prized them
higher even than our material builders, for we
have felt instinctively the spiritual power with
which they have endowed us in the contest for the
mighty stake of immortality. They are helping us
to it, and we have the right to rely on their visions
and trusts and beliefs in this supremest and cul-
minating episode of the adventure of life.
Are all such speculations idle and frivolous?
Have they no place on the mental horizon of a
youth of to-day, living in a world whose inner
nature all the mighty achievements of the scien-
tists, fruitful as they have been in their practical
effects,, have tended rather to obscure than to
illumine? Well, a settled conviction that we live
in a mechanical world, with no penumbra of mys-
tery about us, checks the life-enhancing powers,
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THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE
and chills and depresses the spirit. A belief in the
deadness of things actually seems to kill much of
the glowing life that makes up our appreciation
of art and personality in the world. The scien-
tific philosophy is as much a matter of metaphys-
ics, of theoretical conjecture, as the worst fanat-
icisms of religion. We have a right to shoot our
guesses into the unknown. Life is no adventure
if we let our knowledge, still so feeble and flicker-
ing, smother us. In this scientific age there is a
call for youth to soar and paint a new spiritual
sky to arch over our heads. If the old poetry is
dead, youth must feel and write the new poetry.
It has a challenge both to transcend the physical
evil that taints the earth and the materialistic
poison that numbs our spirits.
The wise men thought they were getting the
old world thoroughly charted and explained.
But there has been a spiritual expansion these
recent years which has created new seas to be
explored and new atmospheres to breathe. It has
been discovered that the world is alive, and that
discovery has almost taken away men's breaths;
it has been discovered that evolution is creative
and that we are real factors in that creation.
After exploring the heights and depths of the
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stars, and getting ourselves into a state of mind
wherewe saw the world objectivelyand diminished
man and his interests almost to a pin-point, we
have come with a rush to the realization that per-
sonality and values are, after all, the important
things in a living world. And no problem of life
or death can be idle. A hundred years ago it was
thought chastening to the fierce pride of youth to
remind it often of man's mortality. But youth to-
day must think of everything in terms of life; yes,
even of death in terms of life. We need not the
chastening of pride, but the stimulation to a sense
of the limitless potentialities of life. No thought
or action that really enhances life is frivolous or
fruitless.
What does not conduce in some way to men's
interests does not enhance life. What decides in
the long run whether our life will be adventurous
or not is the direction and the scope of our inter-
ests. We need a livelier imaginative sympathy
and interest in all that pertains to human nature
and its workings. It is a good sign that youth does
not need to have its attention called to the worthy
and profitable interest of its own personality. It
is a healthy sign that we are getting back homeagain to the old endeavor of "Know thyself!"
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THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE
Our widening experience has shifted the centre of
gravity too far from man's soul. A cultivation of
the powers of one's own personality is one of the
greatest needs of life, too little realized even in
these assertive days, and the exercise of the per-
sonality makes for its most durable satisfactions.
Men are attentive to their business afifairs, but not
nearly enough to their own deeper selves. If they
treated their business interests as they do the
interests of their personality, they would be bank-
rupt within a week. Few people even scratch the
surface, much less exhaust the contemplation, of
their own experience. Few know how to weave a
philosophy of life out of it, that most precious of
all possessions. And few know how to hoard their
memory. For no matter what we have come
through, orhowmany perilswe have safely passed,
or how imperfect and jagged— in some places
perhaps irreparably— our life has been, we cannot
in our heart of hearts imagine how it could have
been different. As we look back on it, it slips in
behind us in orderly array, and, with all its mis-
takes, acquires a sort of eternal fitness, and even,
at times, of poetic glamour.
The things I did, I did because, after all, I amthat sort of a person — that is what life is; —
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YOUTH AND LIFE
and in spite of what others and what I myself
might desire, it is that kind of a person that I am.
The golden moments I can take a unique and
splendid satisfaction in because they are my own;
my realization of how poor and weak they might
seem, if taken from my treasure-chest and exposed
to the gaze of others, does not taint their precious-
ness, for I can see them in the larger light of myown life. Every man should realize that his life
is an epic; unfortunately it usually takes the on-
looker to recognize the fact before he does him-
self. We should oftener read our own epics— and
write them. The world is in need of true auto-
biographies, told in terms of the adventure that
life is. Not every one, it is said, possesses the
literary.gift, but what, on the other hand, is the lit-
erary gift but an absorbing interest in the person-
ality of things, and an insight into the wonders of
living? Unfortunately it is usually only the eccen-
tric or the distinguished who reveal their inner
life. Yet the epic of the humblest life, told in the
light of its spiritual shocks and changes, would
be enthralling in its interest. But the best auto-
biographers are still the masters of fiction, those
wizards of imaginative sympathy,who create souls
and then write their spiritual history, as those
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THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE
souls themselves, were they alive, could perhaps
never write them. Every man, however, can culti-
vate this autobiographical interest in himself, and
produce for his own private view a real epic of
spiritual adventure. And life will be richer and
more full of meaning as the story continues and
life accumulates.
Life changes so gradually that we do not realize
our progress. This small triumph of yesterday wefail to recognize as the summit of the mountain at
whose foot we encamped several years ago in
despair. We forget our hopes and wistfulness and
struggles. We do not look down from the summit
at the valley where we started, and thus we lose
the dramatic sense of something accomplished.
If a man looking back seesnomountain and valley,
but only a straight level plain, it behooves him to
take himself straight to some other spiritual coun-
try where there is opportunity for climbing and
where five years hence will see him on a higher
level, breathing purer air. Most people have no
trouble in remembering their rights and their
wrongs, their pretensions and their ambitions, —things so illusory that they should never evenhave
been thought of. But to forget their progress, to
forget their golden moments, their acquisitions
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YOUTH AND LIFE
of insight and appreciation, the charm of their
friends, the sequence of their ideals,— this is
indeed a deplorable aphasia ! "The days thatmake
us happy make us wise!
" Happiness is too valu-
able to be forgotten, and who will remember yours
if you forget it? It is what has made the best of
you; or, if you have thrown it away from memory,
what could have made you, and made you richer
than you are. If you have neglected such con-
templation, you are poor, and that poverty will be
apparent in your daily personality.
Life in its essence is a heaping-up and accumu-
lation of thought and insight. It [should mount
higher and higher, and be more potent and flow-
ering as life is lived. If you do not keep in your
memory and spirit the finer accumulations of your
life, it will be as if you had only partly lived. Your
living will be a travesty on life, and your progress
only a dull mechanical routine. Even though your
life may be outwardly routine, inwardly, as moral-
ists have always known, it may be full of adven-
ture. Be happy, but not too contented. Con-
tentment may be a vice as well as a virtue; too
often it is a mere cover for sluggishness, and not a
sign of triumph. The mind must have a certain
amount of refreshment and novelty; it will not
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THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE
grow by staying too comfortably at home, and
refusing to put itself to the trouble of travel and
change. It needs to be disturbed every now and
then to keep the crust from forming. People do
not realize this, and let themselves become jaded
and uninterested— and therefore uninteresting
— when such a small touch of novelty would
inspire and stimulate them. A tired interest, in a
healthy mind, wakes with as quick a response to a
new touch or aspect as does a thirsty flower to the
rain. Too many people sit in prison with them-
selves until they get meagre and dull, when the
door was really all the time open, and outside
was freshness and green grass and the warm sun,
which might have revived them and made them
bright again. Listlessness in an old man or woman
is often the telltale sign of such an imprisonment.
Life, instead of being an accumulation of spir-
itual treasure, has been the squandering of its
wealth, in a lapse of interest, as soon as it was
earned. Even unbearable sorrow might have
been the means, by a process of transmutation,
of acquiring a deeper appreciation of life's truer
values. But the squanderer has lost his vision,
because he did not retain on the background of
memory his experience, against which to contrast
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his new reactions, and did not have the emo-
tional image of old novelties to spur him to the
apprehension and appreciation of new ones.
More amazing even than the lack of a healthy
interest in their own personalities is the lack of
most people of an interest, beyond one of a trivial
or professional nature, in others. Our literary art-
ists have scarcely begun to touch the resources of
human ways and acts. Writers surrender reality
for the sake of a plot, and in attempting to make
a point, or to write adventure, squeeze out the
natural traits and nuances of character and the
haphazardnesses of life that are the true adven-
ture and point. We cannot know too much about
each other. All our best education comes from
what people tell us or what we observe them do.
We cannot endure being totally separated from
others, and it is well that we cannot. For it would
mean that we should have then no life above the
satisfaction of our crudest material wants. Our
keenest delights are based upon some manifesta-
tion or other of social life. Even gossip arises not
so much from malice as from a real social interest
in our neighbors; the pity of it is, of course, that
to so many people it is only the misfortunes and
oddities that are interesting.
186
THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE
Let our interests in the social world with which
we come in contact be active and not passive. Let
us give back in return as good an influence and as
much as is given to us. Let us live so as to stimu-
late others, so that we call out the best powers
and traits in them, and make them better than
they are, because of our comprehension and
inspiration. Our life is so bound up with our
friends and teachers and heroes (whether present
in the flesh or not), and we are so dependent upon
them for nourishment and support, that we are
rarely aware how little of us there would be left
were they to be taken away. We are seldom con-
scious enough of the ground we are rooted in and
the air we breathe. We can know ourselves best
by knowing others. There are adventures of per-
sonality in acting and being acted upon, in study-
ing and delighting in the ideas and folkways of
people that hold much in store for those who will
only seek them.
Thus in its perils and opportunities, in its satis-
factions and resistances, in its gifts and responsi-
bilities, for good or for evil, life is an adventure.
In facing its evil, we shall not let it daunt or
depress our spirits; we shall surrender some of our
responsibility for the Universe, and face forward,
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YOUTH AND LIFE
working and encouraging those around us to
cooperate with us and with all who suffer, in fight-
ing preventable wrong. Death we shall transcend
by interpreting everything in terms of life; we
shall be victorious over it by recognizing in it an
aspect of a larger life in which we are immersed.
We shall accept gladly the wealth of days poured
out for us. Alive, in a living world, we shall culti-
vate those interests and (Qualities which enhance
life. We shall try to keep the widest possible fund
of interests in order that life may mount ever
richer, and not become jaded and wearied in its
ebb-flow. We shall never cease to put our ques-
tions to the heart of the world, intent on tracking
down the mysteries of its behavior and its mean-
ing, using each morsel of knowledge to pry further
into its secrets, and testing the tools we use by the
product they create and the hidden chambers
they open. To face the perils and hazards fear-
lessly, and absorb the satisfactions joyfully, to be
curious and brave and eager,— is to know the
adventure of life.
VII
SOME THOUGHTS ON RELIGION
VII
SOME THOUGHTS ON RELIGION
In youth we grow and learn and always the uni-
verse widens around us. The horizon recedes
faster than we can journey towards it. There
comes a time when we look back with longing
to the days when everything we learned seemed
a fast gaining upon the powers of darkness, and
each new principle seemed to illuminate and ex-
plain an immense region of the world. We had
only to keep on learning in steady progress, it
seemed, until we should have dominion over the
whole of it. But there came a time, perhaps, when
advance halted, and our carefully ordered world
began to dissipate and loose ends and fringes to
appear. It became a real struggle to keep our
knowledge securely boxed in our one system,
indeed, in any system, as we found when we rest-
lessly tried one dogma after another as strong-
boxes for our spiritual goods. Always something
eluded us; it was "ever not quite." Just when we
were safest, some new experience came up to be
most incongruously unaccounted for. We had
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YOUTH AND LIFE
our goods, for instance, safely stowed away in the
box of "materialism," when suddenly we realized
that, on its theory, our whole life might run along
precisely as we see it now, we might talk and love
and paint and build without a glimmer of con-
sciousness, that wondrous stuff which is so pal-
pably our light and our life. The materialist can
see in us nothing but the inert accompaniment of
our bodies, the helpless, useless, and even an-
noying spectators of the play of physical forces
through these curious compounds of chemical ele-
ments that we call our bodies. Or if, filled with
the joy of creation, we tried to pack our world
into the dogma of "idealism" and see all hard
material things as emanations from our spiritual
self and plastic under our hand, we were brought
with a shock against some tough, incorrigible fact
that sobered our elation, and forced the unwill-
ing recognition of our impotence upon us again.
It is not, however, from an excess of idealism
that the world suffers to-day. But it is sick rather
with the thorough-going and plausible scientific
materialism with which our philosophy and liter-
ature seem to reek. Pure idealism has long ago
proved too intoxicating a confirmation of our
hopes and desires to seduce for long our tough-
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SOME THOUGHTS ON RELIGION
mindedness. Science has come as a challenge to
both our courage and our honesty. It covertly
taunts us with being afraid to face the universe
as it is; if we look and are saddened, we have
seemed to prove ourselves less than men. For this
advance of scientific speculation has seemed only
to increase the gulf between the proven and" cer-
tain facts, and all the values and significances
of life that our reactions to its richness have pro-
duced in us. And so incorrigibly honest is the
texture of the human mind that we cannot con-
tinue to believe in and cultivate things that we
no longer consider to be real. And science has
undermined our faith in the reality of a spiritual
world that to our forefathers was the only real-
ity in the universe. We are so honest, however,
that when the scientist relegates to a subjective
shadowy realm our world of qualities and divin-
ities, we cannot protest, but only look wistfully
after the disappearing forms. A numbness has
stolen over our religion, art, and literature, and
the younger generation finds a chill and torpor
in those interests of life that should be the highest
inspiration.
Religion in these latter days becomes poetry,
about which should never be asked the question,
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YOUTH AND LIFE
" Is it true? " Art becomes a frivolous toy; litera-
ture a daily chronicle.
There is thus a crucial intellectual dilemma that
faces us to-day. If we accept whole-heartedly the
spiritual world, we seem to be false to the impos-
ing new knowledge of science which is rapidly
making the world comprehensible to us; if we ac-
cept all the claims and implications of science,
we seem to trample on our own souls. Yet wefeel instinctively the validity of both aspects of
the world. Our solution will seem to be, then, to
be content with remaining something less than
monists. We must recognize that this is an infin-
ite universe, and give up our attempt to get all
our experience under one roof. Striving ever for
unity, we must yet xmderstand that this "not-
quite-ness" is one of the fundamental principles
of things. We can no longer be satisfied with a
settlement of the dreary conflict between religion
and science which left for religion only the task of
making hazardous speculations which science was
later to verify or cast aside, as it charted the seas
of knowledge. We cannot be content with a reli-
gion which science is constantly overtaking and
wiping out, as it puts its brave postulates of faith
to rigorous test.
194
SOME THOUGHTS ON RELIGION
The only view of religion and science that will'
satisfy us is one that makes them each the con-
templation of a different aspect of the universe,
—r one, an aspect of quantities and relations, the
other, an aspect of qualities, ideals, and values.^
They may be coordinate and complementary, but
they are not expressible in each others' terms.
There is no question of superior reality. The blue
of a flower is just as real as the ether waves which
science tells us the color "really" is. Scientific
and intuitive knowledge are simply different ways
of appreciating an infinite universe. Scientific
knowledge, for all its dogmatic claims to finality,
is provisional and hypothetical. "If we live in a
certain kind of a world," it says, "certain things
are true." Each fact hinges upon another. Yet
these correlations of the physical world are so
certain and predictable that no sane mind can
doubt them. On the other hand, our knowledge
of qualities is direct and immediate, and seems to
depend on nothing for its completeness. Yet it is
so uncertain and various that no two minds have
precisely the same reactions, and we do not our-
selves have the same reactions at different times.
And these paradoxes give rise to the endless
disputes as to which gives the more real view of
19.5
YOUTH AND LIFE
the universe in which we find ourselves living.
The matter-of-fact person takes the certainty and
lets the immediacy go; the poet and the mys-
tic and the religious man choose the direct reve-
lation and prize this vision far above any logical
cogency. Now it will be the task of this intel-
lectual generation to conquer the paradoxes by
admitting the validity of both the matter-of-fact
view and the mystical. And it is the latter that
requires the present emphasis; it must be resus-
citated from the low estate into which it has
fallen. We must resist the stern arrogances of
science as vigorously as the scientist has resisted
the allurements of religion. We must remind him
that his laws are not visions of eternal truth, so
much as rough-and-ready statements of the prac-
tical nature of things, in so far as they are useful
to us for our grappling with our environment and
somehow changing it. We must demand that he
climb down out of the papal chair, and let his
learning become what it was meant to be, — the
humble servant of humanity. Truth for truth's
sake is an admirable motto for the philosopher,
who really searches to find the inner nature of
things. But the truth of science is for use's sake.
To seek for physical truth which is irrelevant to
196
SOME THOUGHTS ON RELIGION
human needs and purposes is as purely futile an
intellectual gymnastic as the logical excesses of
the schoolmen. The scientist is here to tell us the
practical workings of the forces and elements of
the world; the philosopher, mystic, artist, and
poet are here to tell us of the purposes and mean-
ings of the world as revealed directly, and to show
us the ideal aspect through their own clear fresh
vision.
That vision, however, must be controlled and
enriched by the democratic experience of their
fellow men; their ideal must be to reveal mean-
ings that cannot be doubted by the normal soul,
in the same way that scientific formulations can-
not be doubted by the normal mind. It is here
that we have a quarrel with old religion and old
poetry, that the vision which it brings us is not
sufficiently purged of local discolorations or in-
tellectualistic taints. But it is not a quarrel with
religion and poetry as such; this age thirsts for a
revelation of the spiritual meanings of the wider
world that has been opened to us, and the com-
plex and baffling anomalies that seem to confront
us. It is our imperative duty to reemphasize the
life of qualities and ideals, to turn again our gaze
to that aspect of the world from which men have
197
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always drawn what gave life real worth and rein-
state those spiritual things whose strength ad-
vancing knowledge has seemed to sap. There is
room for a new idealism, but an idealism that
sturdily keeps its grip on the real, that grapples
with the new knowledge and with the irrevocable
loss of much of the old poetry and many of the old
values, and wrests out finer qualities and a nobler
spiritual life than the world has yet seen. It is
not betrayal of our integrity to believe that the
desires and interests of men, their hopes and fears
and creative imaginings, are as real as any atoms
or formulas.
Now the place of religion in this new idealism
will be the same place that its essential spirit has
always held in the spiritual life of men. Religion
is our sense of the quality of the universe itself,
the broadest, profoundest, and most constant of
our intuitions. Men have always felt that, out-
side of the qualities of concrete things, there lay
a sort of infinite quality that they could identify
with the spirit of the universe, and they have
called it God. To this quality men have always
responded, and that response and appreciation
is religion. To appreciate this cosmic quality is
to be religious, and to express that appreciation
198
SOME THOUGHTS ON RELIGION
is to worship. Religion is thus as much and eter-
nally a part of life as our senses themselves;
the only justification for making away with re-
ligion would be an event that would make awaywith our senses. The scientist must always find it
diflBcult to explain why, if man's mind, as all agree
that it did, developed in adaptation to his envi-
ronment, it should somehowhave become adapted
so perfectly to a spiritual world of qualities and
poetic interpretation of phenomena, and not to
the world of atomic motion and mechanical law
which scientific philosophy assures us is the "real
"
world. Our minds somehow adapted themselves,
not to the hard world of fact, but to a world of
illusion, which had not the justification of being
even practically useful or empirically true. If
the real world is mechanical, we should have a
right to expect the earliest thinking to be scien-
tific, and the spiritual life to come in only after
centuries of refinement of thought. But the first
reactions of men were of course purely qualitat-
ive, and it is only within the last few] minutes of
cosmic time that we have known of the quanti-
tative relations of things. Is it hard, then, to be-
lieve that, since we and the world have grown
up together, there must be some subtle correla-
199
YOUTH AND LIFE
tion between it and the values and qualities that
we feel, that our souls must reflect— not faith-
fully, perhaps, because warped by a thousand
alien compelling physical forces, and yet some-
how indomitably— a spiritual world that is per-
haps even more real, because more immediate
and constant, than the physical? We may par-
tially create it, but we partially reflect it too.
That cosmic quality we feel as personality.
Not artificial or illusive is this deeply rooted
anthropomorphic sense which has always been at
' the bottom of man's religious consciousness. Weare alive, and we have a right to interpret the
world as living; we are persons, and we have a
right to interpret the world in terms of personal-
ity. In all religions, through the encrustations of
dogma and ritual, has been felt that vital sense
of the divine personality, keeping clean and sweet
the life of man. The definite appeal of the
Church, in times like these, when the external
props fall away, is to the incarnation of the divine
personality, and the ideal of character deduced
from it as a pattern for life. This is the reli-
gion of ordinary people to-day; it has' been the
heart of Christianity for nineteen hundred years.
Our feeling of this cosmic quality may be vague
200
SOME THOUGHTS ON RELIGION
or definite, diffused or crystallized, but to those
of us who sense behind our pulsing life a mystery
which perplexes, sobers, and elevates us, that
quality forms a permanent scenic background for
our life.
To feel this cosmic quality of a divine person-
ality, in whom we live, move, and have our being,
is to know religion. The ordinary world we live
in is incurably dynamic; we are forced to think
and act in terms of energy and change and con-
stant rearrangement and flux of factors and ele-
ments. And we live only as we give ourselves up
to that stream and play of forces. Throughout
all the change, however, there comes a sense of
this eternal quality. In the persistence of our own
personality, the humble fragment of a divine per-
sonality, we get the pattern of its permanence.
The Great Companion is ever with us, silently
ratifying our worthy deeds and tastes and re-
sponses. The satisfactions of our spiritual life, of
our judgments and appreciations of morality and
art and any kind of excellence, come largely from
this subtle corroboration that we feel from some
unseen presence wider than ourselves. It accom-
panies not a part but the whole of our spiritual
life, silently strengthening our responses to per-
201
YOUTH AND LIFE
sonality and beauty, our sense of irony, the refine-
ment of our taste, sharpening our moral judg-
ment, elevating our capacities for happiness,
filling ever richer our sense of the worth of life.
And this cosmic influence in which we seem to be
immersed we can no more lose or doubt— after
we have once felt the rush of time past us, seen
a friend die, or brooded on the bitter thought of
our personal death, felt the surge of forces of life
and love, wondered about consciousness, been
melted before beauty— than we can lose or doubt
ourselves. The wonder of it is exhaustless,— the
beneficence over whose workings there yet
breathes an inexorable sternness, the mystery of
time and death, the joy of beauty and creative
art and sex, and sheer consciousness.
Against this scenic background, along this deep
undercurrent of feeling, our outward, cheerful,
settled, and orderly life plays its part. That life
is no less essential; we must be willing to see life
in two aspects, the world as deathless yet ever-
creative, evolution yet timeless eternity. To be
religious is to turn our gaze away from the dy-
namic to the static and the permanent, away from
the stage to the scenic background of our lives.
Religion cannot, therefore, be said to have much
SOME THOUGHTS ON RELIGION
of a place in our activity of life, except as it fixes
the general emotional tone. We have no right
to demand that it operate practically, nor can
we call altruistic activity, and enthusiasm for a
noble cause, religion. Moral action is really more
a matter of social psychology than of religion. All
religions have been ethical only as a secondary
consideration. Religion in and for itself is some-
thing else; we can enjoy it only by taking, as it
were, the moral holiday into its regions when we
are weary of the world of thinking and doing.
It is a land to retreat into when we are battered
and degraded by the dynamic world about us, and
require rest and recuperation. It is constantly
there behind us, but to live in it always is to take
a perpetual holiday.
At all times we may have its beauty with us,
however, as we may have prospects of far moun-
tains and valleys. As we go in the morning to
work in the fields, religion is this enchanting view
of the mountains, inspiring us and lifting our
hearts with renewed vigor. Through all the long
day's work we feel their presence with us, and
have only to turn around to see them shining
splendidly afar with hope and kindliness. Even
the austerest summits are warm in the afternoon
203
YOUTH AND LIFE
sun. Yet if we gaze at them all day long, we shall
accomplish no work. Nor shall we finish our al-
lotted task if we succumb to their lure and leave
our fields to travel towards them. As we return
home weary at night, the mountains are still there
to refresh and cheer us with their soft colors and
outline blended in the purple light. When our
task is entirely done, it has been our eternal hope
to journey to those far mountains and valleys;
if this is not to be, at least their glorious view will
be the last to fall upon us as we close our eyes. But
we know that, whatever happens, if we have done
our work well, have performed faithfully our
daily tasks of learning to control and manage and
make creative the tough soil of this material world
in which we find ourselves, if we have neither al-
lowed its toughness to distract us from the beauty
of the eternal background, nor let those far
visions slow down the wheels of life, distract us
from our work, or blur our thought and pale bytheir light the other qualities and beauties around
us — we shall attain what is right for us when welay down our tools. In a living world, death can
be no more than an apparition.
VIII
THE MYSTIC TURNED RADICAL
VIII
THE MYSTIC TURNED RADICAL
The mystical temperament is little enough popu-
lar in this workaday modem world of ours. The
mystic, we feel, comes to us discounted from the
start; he should in all decency make constant
apologies for his existence. In a practical age of
machinery he is an anomaly, an anachronism.
He must meet the direct challenge of the scientist,
who guards every approach to the doors of truth
and holds the keys of its citadel. Any thinker who
gets into the fold by another way is a thief and a
robber.
The mystic must answer that most heinous of
all charges, — of being unscientific. By tradition
he is even hostile to science. For his main inter-
est is in wonder, and science by explaining things
attacks the very principle of his life. It not only
diminishes his opportunities for wonder, but
threatens to make him superfluous by ultimately
explaining everything.
The scientist may say that there is no necessary
antithesis between explanation and that beauti-
207
YOUTH AND LIFE
ful romance of thought we call wonder. The sav-
age, who can explain nothing, is the very creature
who has no wonder at all. Everything is equally
natural to him. Only a mind that has acquaintance
with laws of behavior can be surprised at events.
The wonder of the scientist, however, although
it be of a more robust, tough-minded variety, is
none the less wonder. A growing acquaintance
with the world, an increasing at-homeness in it,
is not necessarily incompatible with an ever-in-
creasing marvel both at the beautiful fitness of
things and the limitless field of ignorance and
mystery beyond. So the modem mystic must
break with his own tradition if he is to make an
appeal to this generation, and must recognize
that the antithesis between mystic and scientific
is not an eternally valid one.
It is just through realization of this fact that
Maeterlinck, the best of modern mystics, makes
his extraordinary appeal. For, as he tells us, the
valid mystery does not begin at the threshold of
knowledge but only after we have exhausted oiu"
resources of knowing. His frank and genuine
acceptance of science thus works out a modus
Vivendi between the seen and the unseen. It allows
many of us who have given our allegiance to
208
THE MYSTIC TURNED RADICAL
science to hail him gladly as a prophet who sup-
plements the work of the wise men of scientific
research, without doing violence to our own con-
sciences. For the world is, in spite of its scientific
clamor, still far from ready really to surrender it-
self to prosaicness. It is still haunted with the
dreams of the ages— dreams of short roads to
truth, visions of finding the Northwest passage
to the treasures of the Unseen. Only we must go as
far as possible along the traveled routes of science.
Maeterlinck is thus not anti-scientific or pseudo-
scientific, but rather sub-scientific. He speaks
of delicately felt and subtle influences and aspects
of reality that lie beneath the surface of our
lives, of forces and shadows that cannot be meas-
ured quantitatively or turned into philosophical
categories. Or we may say that he is ultra-scien-
tific. As science plods along, opening up the
dark wilderness, he goes with the exploring party,
throwing a search-light before them; fiickering
enough and exasperatingly uncertain at times, but
sufficiently constant to light up the way, point
out a path, and give us confidence that the terrors
before us are not so formidable as we have feared.
His influence on our time is so great because we
believe that he is a seer, a man with knowledge of
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YOUTH AND LIFE
things hidden from our eyes. We go to him as to a
spiritual clairvoyant, — to have him tell us where
to find the things our souls have lost.
But the modem mystic must not only recognize
the scientific aspect of the age, — he must feel
the social ideal that directs the spiritual energies
of the time. It is the glory of Maeterlinck's mys-
ticism that it has not lingered in the depths of the
soul, but has passed out to illuminate our thinking
in regard to the social life about us. The growth
of this duality of vision has been with him a long
evolution. His early world was a shadowy, intan-
gible thing. As we read the early essays, we seem
to be constantly hovering on the verge of an idea,
just as when we read the plays we seem to be
hovering on the verge of a passion. This long
brooding away fromtheworld, however, was fruit-
ful and momentous. The intense gaze inward
trained the eye, so that when the mists cleared
away and revealed the palpitating social world
about him, his insight into its meaning was as
much more keen and true than our own as had
been his sense of the meaning of the individual
soul. The light he turns outward to reveal the
meaning of social progress is all the whiter for
having burned so long within.
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THE MYSTIC TURNED RADICAL
In the essay on "Our Social Duty," the clearest
and the consummate expression of this new out-
ward look, there are no contaminating fringes of
vague thought; all is clear white light. With the
instinct of the true radical, the poet has gone to
the root of the social attitude. Our duty as mem-bers of society is to be radical, he tells us. Andnot only that, but an excess of radicalism is essen-
tial to the equilibrium of life. Society so habitu-
ally thinks on a plane lower than is reasonable
that it behooves us to think and to hope on an
even higher plane than seems to be reasonable.
This is the overpoweringly urgent philosophy of
radicalism. It is the beautiful courage of such
words that makes them so vital an inspiration.
YOUTH AND LIFE
To many of us, then, this call of Maeterlinck's
to the highest of radicalisms will seem irrelevant;
this new social note which appears so strongly in
all his later work will seem a deterioration from
the nobler mysticism of his earlier days. But
rather should it be viewed as the fruit of matured
insight. There has been no decay, no surrender.
It is the same mysticism, but with the direction
of the vision altered. This essay is the expression
of the clearest vision that has yet penetrated our
social confusion, the sanest and highest ideal that
has been set before progressive minds. It may be
that its utter fearlessness, its almost ascetic de-
tachment from the matter-of-fact things of politi-
cal life, its clear cold light of conviction and pene-
tration, may repel some whose hearts have been
warmed by Maeterlinck's subtle revelations of
the spiritual life. They may reproach him be-
cause it has no direct bearings on the immediate
practical social life; it furnishes no weapon of
reform, no tool with which to rush out and over-
throw some vested abuse. But to the traveler lost
in the wood the one thing needful is a pole-star to
show him his direction. The star is unapproach-
able, serene, cold, and lofty. But although he can-
not touch it, or utilize it directly to extend his
212
THE MYSTIC TURNED RADICAL
comfort and progress, it is the most useful of all
things to him. It fills his heart with a great hope;
it coordinates his aimless wanderings and grop-
ings, and gives meaning and purpose to his course.
So a generation lost in a chaos of social change
can find in these later words of Maeterlinck a pole-
star and a guide. They do for the social life of
man what the earlier essays did for the individual.
They endow it with values and significances that
will give steadfastness and resource to his vision
as he looks out on the great world of human pro-
gress, and purpose and meaning to his activity
as he looks ahead into the dim world of the future.
IX
SEEING, WE SEE NOT
IX
SEEING, WE SEE NOT
It is a mere superstition, Maeterlinck tells us in
one of his beautiful essays, that there is anything
irrevocable about the past. On the contrary, weare constantly rearranging it, revising it, remaking
it. For it is only in our memory that it exists, and
our conception of it changes as the loose fringes
of past events are gathered up into a new mean-
ing, or when a sudden fortune lights up a whole
series in our lives, and shows us, stretching back
in orderly array and beautiful significance, what
we had supposed in our blindness to be a sad and
chaotic welter. It is no less a superstition to sup-
pose that we have a hand in making the present.
The present, like the past, is always still to be
made; indeed, must wait its turn, so to speak, to
be seen in its full meaning until after the past
itself has been remoulded and reconstituted. It
is depressing to think that we do not know our own
time, that the events we look upon have a perma-
nent value far different from the petty one that
we endow them with, that they fit into a larger
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YOUTH AND LIFE
whole of which we see only a dim fraction— and
that the least important because the seed of some-
thing that shall come much later into full fruition.
Must our short life pass away without knowledge
or vision of the majestic processes which are un-
folding themselves imder our very eyes, while
we have wasted our admiration and distorted our
purpose by striving to interpret the ephemeral,
that is gone as soon as we? Even the wisest among
us can see with but a dim eye into the future,
and make rather a lucky guess at its potentialities
than a true prophecy based on a realization of the
real tendencies of the time. It is only the Past
that we really make. And this may account for
our love of it. This fragile thing of tradition that
we have so carefully constructed and so lovingly
beautified, this artistic creation of a whole peo-
ple or race, becomes most naturally the object of
our tenderest solicitude. Any attack upon it that
suggests a marring of its golden beauty, any new
proposal that threatens to render it superfluous,
elicits the outraged cry of anger, the passionate
defense, of the mother protecting her child. For
the Past is really the child of the Present. We are
the authors of its being, and upon it we lavish all
our thoughts, our interest and our delight. And218
SEEING, WE SEE NOT
even our hopes are centred in the Past, for the
most enthusiastic among us can do no more than
hope that something worth while will come out of
the Past to nourish us in the approaching Present.
Concern for the Future is so new a thing in humanhistory that we are hardly yet at home with the
feeling. Perhaps, if we thought more about what
was before us, we shouldcome to know more about
it. Meanwhile our only consolation is that if we
cannot see, neither did the generations that were
before us. And we have the advantage of knowing
that we do not see, while they did not care about
their ignorance at all.
We have constantly to check ourselves in read-
ing history with the remembrance that, to the
actors in the drama, events appeared very differ-
ently from the way they appear to us. We know
what they were doing far better than they knew
themselves. We are in the position of the novel
reader who looks, before he begins to read, to see
how the plot turns out. This orderly and dramatic
chronicle of history that thrills us as we read
has only been orderly and dramatic to readers of
the present time, who can see the dSnouement of
the story. History is peculiarly the creation of the
present. Even thegreatmen of thepast are largely
219
YOUTH AND LIFE
the agglomerations of centuries of hero-worship.
Genius is as much a slow accretion of the ages as
an endowment of man. Few great poets were seen
in the full glory of their superhuman capacity by
their fellows. Contemporary opinion of the great
has been complimentary but seldom excessively
laiidatory, and there are sad instances of the
decay and deflation of a supernatural personality
through the smooth, gentle, imperceptibly creep-
ing oblivion of the centuries.
We rarely see what is distinctive in our own
time. The city builders of the West are quite
unconscious of the fact that they are leaving be-
hind them imperishable and mighty memorials
of themselves. Few of the things that we admire
now will be considered by posterity as noteworthy
and distinctive of our age. All depends on the
vitality of our customs and social habits, and
some show as high a mortality as others do a stub-
bom tenacity of life. What we are witnessing is a
gigantic struggle of customs and ideas to survive
and propagate their kind. The means of subsist-
ence is limited; it is impossible that all should be
able to live. The fascinating problem for the social
philosopher is which of these beliefs and tenden-
cies will prove strong enough to overcome their
220
SEEING, WE SEE NOT
rivals and make their stock a permanent type.
How many of the fads and brilliant theories and
new habits of thought and taste will be able to
maintain their place in the world? If we could
discern them, we should know the distinction of
our age. Definite epochs of the past we distinguish
and celebrate because they contained the germs of
ideas or the roots of institutions that still survive
among us, or customs and habits of thought that
flourished in them with great brilliancy bu^ have
now utterly passed away. Now these beginnings
are quite too subtle for us to see in our contempo-
rary life, and there are so many brilliancies that
it is impossible to pick out with any definiteness
the things which have power to project themselves
into the future, and cast a broad trail of light back
to our age. Most of those very things that seem
to us imperishable will be the ones to fade, —fade, indeed, so gradually that they will not even
be missed. It is this gradual disappearance that
gives the most thorough oblivion. History re-
members only the brilliant failures and the bril-
liant successes.
We are fond of calling this an age of transition,
but ifwe trace history back we find that practically
every age— at least for many centuries— has
221
YOUTH AND LIFE
been an age of transition. If we must set a start-
ing-point from whicli we have been moving, the
social philosopher will be inclined to place it about
the beginning of the sixteenth century. If we
have been in transition for four hundred years, it
seems almost time to settle down from this wild
ferment of beliefs and discoveries that has kept
the world's mind in constant turmoil since the
time of the Renaissance. There are signs that
such a crystallization is taking place. We are
weeding out our culture, and casting aside the
classical literature that was the breeding-ground
for the old ideas. We have achieved as yet little
to take its place. Most of the modem literature
is rather a restless groping about in the dark for
new modes of thinking and new principles of life,
and thus far it hardly seems to have grasped the
robust and vital in the new to any appreciable
extent. One can hardly believe that this mor-
bid virus that is still working with undiminished
vigor and deadly effect will succeed in making
itself the dominant note in European literature
for the next five hundred years. One hates to
think that our posterity is to be doomed to
torture itself into appreciating our feverish mod-
ern art and music, and learn to rank the wild
SEEING, WE SEE NOT
complexities of Strauss with the sublimities of
Beethoven. Shall we be sure that the conquest
of the air is finally achieved and a third dimen-
sion added to man's traveling, or is it all simply
another daring and brilliant stab at the impossi-
ble, another of those blasphemies against nature
which impious man is constantly striving to com-
mit? There are few signs of the Socialistic State,
but who knows what births of new institutions, of
which we are now quite unaware, future ages will
see to have been developing in our very midst?
Is religion doomed, or is it merely being trans-
formed, so that we shall be seen to have been
creating amid all our indifference a new type and
a new ideal? Will our age actually be distinctive
as the era of the Dawn of Peace, or will the baby
institution of arbitration disappear before a crude
and terrible reality? Are we progressing, or shall
we seem to have sown the seeds of world decay in
this age of ours, and at a great crisis in history let
slip another opportunity to carry mankind to a
higher social level? It is maddening to the phil-
osopher to think how long he will have to live to
find an answer to these questions. He wants to
know, but in the present all he can do is to guess
at random. Not immortality, but an opportunity
223
YOUTH AND LIFE
to wake up every hundred years or so to see how
the world is progressing, may well be his desire
and his dream. Such an immortality may be
incredible, but it is the only form which has ever
proved satisfactory, or ever will, to the rational
man.
XTHE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE
XTHE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE
It is good to be reasonable, but too much ration-
ality puts the soul at odds with life. For ration-
ality implies an almost superstitious reliance on
logical proofs And logical motives, and it is logic
that life mocks and contradicts at every turn.
The most annoying people in the world are those
who demand reasons for everything, and the most
discouraging are those who map out ahead of
them long courses of action, plan their lives, and
systematically in the smallest detail of their ac-
tivity adapt means to ends. Now the difficulty
with all the prudential virtues is that they imply
a world that is too good to be true. It would be
pleasant to have a world where cause and effect
interlocked, where we could see the future, where
virtue had its reward, and our characters and re-
lations with other people and the work we wish
to do could be planned out with the same cer-
tainty with which cooks plan a meal. But we
know that that is not the kind of a world we actu-
ally live in. Perhaps men have thought that, by
227
YOUTH AND LIFE
cultivating the rational virtues and laying em-
phasis on prudence and forethought, they could
bend the stubborn constitution of things to meet
their ideals. It has always been the fashion to
insist, in spite of all the evidence, that the world
was in reality a rational place where certain im-
mutable moral principles could be laid down with
the same certainty of working that physical laws
possess. It has always been represented that the
correct procedure of the moral life was to choose
one's end or desire, to select carefully all the
means by which that end could be realized, and
then, by the use of the dogged motive force of
the will, to push through the plans to completion.
In the homilies on success, it has always been im-
plied that strength of will was the only requisite.
Success became merely a matter of the ratio be-
tween the quantity of effort and will-power ap-
plied, and the number of obstacles to be met. If
one failed, it was because the proper amount of
effort had not been applied, or because the plans
had not been properly constructed. The remedy
was automatically to increase the effort or ration-
alize the plans. Life was considered to be a battle,
the strategy of which a general might lay out be-
forehand, an engagement in which he might plan
228
THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE
and anticipate to the minutest detail the move-
ment of his forces and the disposition of the
enemy. But one does not have to live very long
to see that this belief in the power and the desir-
ability of controlling things is an illusion. Life
works ia a series of surprises. One's powers are
given in order that one may be alert and ready,
resourceful and keen. The interest of life lies
largely in its adventurousness, and not in its
susceptibility to orderly mapping. The enemy
rarely comes up from the side the general has
expected; the battle is usually fought out on vastly
different lines from those that have been carefully
foreseen and rationally organized. And similarly
in life do complex forces utterly confound and
bajffle our best laid plans.
Our strategy, unless it is open to instant cor-
rection, unless it is flexible, and capable of infinite
resource and modification, is a handicap rather
than an aid in the battle of life. In spite of the
veracious accounts of youths hewing their way
to success as captains of industry or statesmen,
with their eye singly set on a steadfast purpose,
we may be sure that life seldom works that way.
It is not so tractable and docile, even to the strong-
est. The rational ideal is one of those great moral
YOUTH AND LIFE
hypocrisies which every one preaches and no one
practices, but which we all believe with super-
stitious reverence, and which we take care shall
be proven erroneous by no stubborn facts of life.
Better that the facts should be altered than that
the moral tradition should die!
One of its evil effects is the compressing influ-
ence it has on many of us. Recognizing that for
us the world is an irrational place, we are willing
to go on believing that there are at least some
gifted beings who are proving the truth and vin-
dicating the eternal laws of reason. We join
willingly the self-stigmatized ranks of the incom-
petent and are content to shine feebly in the re-
flected light of those whose master wills and power
of effort have brought them through in rational
triumph to their ends. The younger generation
is coming very seriously to doubt both the prac-
ticability and worth of this rational ideal. They
do not find that the complex affairs of either the
world or the soul work according to laws of
reason. The individual as a member of society
is at the mercy of great social laws that regul-
ate his fortime for him, construct for him his phi-
losophy of life, and dictate to him his ways of
making a living. As an individual soul, he is the
. 230
THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE
creature of impulses and instincts which he does
not create and which seem to lie quite outside the
reach of his riational will. Looked at from this
large social viewpoint, his will appears a puny
aflfair indeed. There seems little room left in
which to operate, either in the sphere of society
or in his own spiritual life. That little of free-
will, however, which there is, serves for our hu-
man purposes. It must be our care simply that
we direct it wisely; and the rational ideal is not
the wisest way of directing it. The place of our
free will in the scheme of life is not to furnish
driving, but directing power. The engineer could
never create the power that drives his engine, but
he can direct it into the channels where it will
be useful and creative. The superstition of the
strong will has been almost like an attempt to
create power, something the soul could never do.
The rational ideal has too often been a mere chal-
lenge to attain the unattainable. It has ended in
futility or failure.
This superstition comes largely from our incor-
rigible habit of looking back over the past, and
putting purpose into it. The great man looking
back over his career, over his ascent from the hum-
ble level of his boyhood to his present power and
231
YOUTH AND LIFE
riches, imagines that that ideal success was in his
mind from his earliest years. He sees a progress,
which was really the happy seizing of fortunate
opportunities, as the carrying-out of a fixed pur-
pose. But the purpose was not there at the begin-
ning; it is the crowning touch added to the picture,
which completes and satisfies our age-long hun-
ger for the orderly and correct. But we all, rich
and poor, successful and unsuccessful, live from
hand to mouth. We all alike find life at the begin-
ning a crude mass of puzzling possibilities. All of
us, unless we inherit a place in the world, — and
then we are only half alive, — have the same pre-
carious struggle to get a foothold. The difference
is in the fortune of the foothold, and not in our
private creation of any mystical force of will.
It is a question of happy occasions of exposure
to the right stimulus that will develop our powers
at the right time. The capacity alone is sterile;
it needs the stimulus to fertilize it and produce
activity and success. The part that our free will
can play is to expose ourselves consciously to the
stimulus; it cannot create it or the capacity, but
it can bring them together.
In other words, for the rational ideal we must
substitute the experimental ideal. Life is not a
232
THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE
campaign of battle, but a laboratory where its
possibilities for the enhancement of happiness and
the realization of ideals are to be tested and ob-
served. We are not to start life with a code of its
laws in our pocket, with its principles of activity
already learned by heart, but we are to discover
those principles as we go, by conscientious experi-
ment. Even those laws that seem incontrovert-
ible we are to test for ourselves, to see whether
they are thoroughly vital to our own experience
and our own genius. We are animals, and our edu-
cation in life is, after all, different only in degree,
and not in kind, from that of the monkey who
learns the trick of opening his cage. To get out of
his cage, the monkey must find and open a some-
what complicated latch. How does he set about
it? He blunders around for a long time, without
method or purpose, but with the waste of an
enormous amount of energy. At length he acci-
dentally strikes the right catch, and the door flies
open. Our procedure in youth is little different.
We feel a vague desire to expand, to get out of
our cage, and liberate our dimly felt powers. Weblunder around for a time, until we accidentally
put ourselves in a situation where some capacity
is touched, some latent energy liberated, and the
233
YOUTH AND LIFE
direction set for us, along which we have only to
move to be free and successful. We will be hardly
human if we do not look back on the process and
congratulate ourselves on our tenacity and pur-
pose and strong will. But of course the thing
was wholly irrational. There were neither plans
nor purposes, perhaps not even discoverable effort.
For when we found the work that we did best,
we found also that we did it easiest. And the
outlines of the most dazzling career are little
different. Until habits were formed or prestige
acquired which could float these successful gen-
iuses, their life was but the resourceful seizing of
opportunity, the utilization, with a minimum of
purpose or effort, of the promise of the passing
moment. They were living the experimental life,
aided by good fortune and opportunity.
Now the youth brought up to the strictly ra-
tional ideal is like the animal who tries to get out
of his cage by going straight through the bars.
The duck, beating his wings against his cage, is a
symbol of the highest rationality. His logic is
plain, simple, and direct. He is in the cage; there
is the free world outside; nothing but the bars
separate them. The problem is simply to fortify
his will and effort and make them so strong that
234
THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE
they will overcome the resistance of the cage. His
error evidently lies not in his method, but in his
estimation of the strength of the bars. But youth
is no wiser; it has no data upon which to estimate
either its own strength or the strength of its ob-
stacles. It counts on getting out through its own
self-reliant strength and will. Like the duck, " im-
possible" is a word not found in its vocabu-
lary. And like the duck, it too often dashes out
its spirit against the bars of circumstance. Howoften do we see young people, brought up with the
old philosophy that nothing was withheld from
those who wanted and worked for things with
sufficient determination, beating their ineffectual
wings against their bars,when perhaps in another
direction the door stands open that would lead to
freedom
!
We do not hear enough of the tragedies of mis-
placed ambition. When the plans of the man of
will and determination fail, and the inexorable
forces of life twist his purposes aside from their
end, he is sure to suffer the prostration of failure.
His humiliation, too, is in proportion to the very
strength of his will. It is the burden of defeat, or
at best the sting of petty success, that crushes
men, and crushes them all the more thoroughly if
235
YOUTH AND LIFE
they have been brought up to believe in the essen-
tial rationality of the world and the power of will
and purpose. It is not that they have aimed too
high, but that they have aimed in the wrong di-
rection. They have not set out experimentally to
find the work to which their powers were adapted,
they did not test coolly and impartially the direc-
tion in which their achievement lay. They forgot
that, though faith may remove moimtains, the
will alone is not able. There is an urgency on
every man to develop his powers to the fullest
capacity, but he is not called upon to develop
those that he does not possess. The will cannot
create talent or opportunity. The wise man is he
who has the clear vision to discern the one, and
the calm patience to await the other. Will, with-
out humor and irony and a luminous knowledge
of one's self, is likely to drive one to dash one's
brains out against a stone wall. The world is too
full of people with nothing except a will. The
mistake of youth is to believe that the philosophy
of experimentation is enervating. They want to
attack life frontally, to win by the boldness of
their attack, or by the exceeding excellence of their
rational plans and purposes. But therein comes
a time when they learn perhaps that it is better
THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE
to take life not with their naked fists, but more
scientifically, — to stand with mind and soul
alert, ceaselessly testing and criticizing, taking
and rejecting, poised for opportunity, and sensi-
tive to all good influences.
The experimental life does not put one at the
mercy of chance. It is rather the rational mind
that is constantly being shocked and deranged by
circumstances. But the dice of the experimenter
are always loaded. For he does not go into an
enterprise, spiritual or material, relying simply
on his reason and will to pull him through. Heasks himself beforehand whether something good
is not sure to come whichever way the dice fall,
or at least whether he can bear the event of fail-
ure, whether his spirit can stand it if the experi-
ment ends in humiliation and barrenness. It is
.surprising how many seeming disasters one finds
one can bear in this anticipatory look; the tension
of the failure is relieved, anyhow. By looking
ahead, one has insured one's self up to the limit
of the venture, and one cannot lose. But to the
man with the carefully planned campaign, every
step is crucial. If all does not turn out exactly as
he intends, he is ruined. He thinks he insures
himself by the excellence of his designs and the
237
YOUTH AND LIFE
craftiness of his skill. But he insures himself by
the strange method of putting all his eggs in one
basket. He thinks, of course, he has arranged his
plans so that, if they fall, the universe falls with
them. But when the basket breaks, and the uni-
verse does not fall, his ruin is complete.
Ambition and the rational ideal seem to be only
disastrous; if unsuccessful, they produce misan-
thropists; if successful, beings that prey upon their
fellow men. Too much rationality makes a man
mercenary and calculating. He has too much at
stake in everything he does to know that calm dis-
'interestedness of spirit which is the mark of the
experimental attitude towards life. Our attitude
towards our personal affairs, material and spirit-
ual, should be like the interest we take in sports
and games. The sporting interest is one secret of a
healthy attitude towards life. The detached en-
thusiasm it creates is a real ingredient of happi-
ness. The trouble with the rational man is that
he has bet on the game. If his side wins, there is a
personal reward for him; if it loses, he himself
suffers a loss. He cannot know the true sporting
interest which is unaffected by considerations of
the end, and views the game as the thing, and
not the outcome. To the experimental attitude.
THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE
failure means nothing beyond a shade of regret or
chagrin. Whether we win or lose, something has
been learned, some insight and appreciation of the
workings of others or of ourselves. We are ready
and eager to begin another game; defeat has not
dampened our enthusiasm. But if the man whohas made the wager loses, he has lost, too, all
heart for playing. Or, if he does try again, it is
not for interest in the game, but with a redoubled
intensity of self-interest to win back what he has
lost. With the sporting interest, one looks on one's
relations with others, on one's little r61e in the
world, in the same spirit that we look on a politi-
cal contest, where we are immensely stirred by the
clash of issues and personalities, but where we
know that the country will run on in about the
same way, whoever is elected. This knowledge
does not work against our interest in the struggle
itself, nor in the outcome. It only insures us
against defeat. It makes life livable by endowing
us with disinterestedness. If we lose, why, better
luck next time, or, at worst, is not losing a part
of life?
The experimenter with life, then, must go into
his laboratory with the mind of the scientist. Hehas nothing at stake except the discovery of the
YOUTH AND LIFE
truth, and he is willing to work carefully and
methodically and even cold-bloodedly in elicit-
ing it from the tangled skein of phenomena. But
it is exactly in this cheerful, matter-of-fact way
that we are never willing to examine our own per-
sonalities and ideas. We take ourselves too seri-
ously, and handle our tastes and enthusiasms as
gingerly as if we feared they would shrivel away
at the touch. We perpetually either underestim-
ate or overestimate our powers and worth, and
suffer such losses on account of the one and hu-
miliations on account of the other, as serve to
unbalance our knowledge of ourselves, and dis-
courage attempts to find real guiding principles
of our own or others' actions. We need this object-
ive attitude of the scientist. We must be self-con-
scious with a detached self-consciousness, treating
ourselves as we treat others, experimenting to dis-
cover our possibilities and traits, testing oiu-selves
with situations, and gradually building up a body
of law and doctrine for ourselves, a real morality
that will have far more worth and power and vir-
tue than all that has been tried and tested before
by no matter how much of alien human exper-
ience. We must start our quest with no prepos-
sessions, with no theory of what ought to happen
240
THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE
when we expose ourselves to certain stimuli. It
is our business to see what does happen, and then
act accordingly. If the electrical experimenter
started with a theory that like magnetic poles at-
tract each other, he would be shocked to discover
that they actually repelled each other. He might
even set it down to some inherent depravity of
matter. But if his theory was not a prejudice but
a hypothesis, he would find it possible to revise it
quickly when he saw how the poles actually be-
haved. And he would not feel any particular
chagrin or humiliation.
But we usually find it so hard to revise our
theories about ourselves and each other. We hold
them as prejudices and not as hypotheses, and
when the facts of life seem to disprove them, we
either angrily clutch at our theories and snarl in
defiance, or we pull them out of us with such a
wrench that they draw blood. The scientist's
way is to start with a hypothesis and then to pro-
ceed to verify it by experiment. Similarly ought
we to approach life and test all our hypotheses by
experience. Oiu" methods have been too rigid.
We have started with moral dogmas, and when
life obstinately refused to ratify them, we have
railed at it, questioned its sincerity, instead of
241
YOUTH AND LIFE
adopting some new hypothesis, which more
nearly fitted our experience, and testing it until
we hit on the principle which explained our work-
ings to ourselves. The common-sense, rule-of-
thumb morality which has come down to us is
no more valid than the common-sense, scientific
observation that the sun goes round the earth.
We can rely no longer on the loose gleanings of
homely proverb and common sense for our know-
ledge of personality and huraan nature and life.
If we do not adopt the experimental life, we are
still in bondage to convention. To learn of life
from others' words is like learning to build a
steam-engine from books in the class-room. Wemay learn of principles in the spiritual life that
have proven true for millions of men, but even
these we must test to see if they hold true for our
individual world. We can never attain any self-
reliant morality if we allow ourselves to be hyp-
notized by fixed ideas of what is good or bad. Nomatter how good our principles, our devotion to
morality will be mere lip-service unless each be-
lief is individually tested, and its power to work
vitally in our lives demonstrated.
But this moral experimentation is not the mere
mechanical repetition of the elementary student
242
THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE
in the laboratory, who makes simple experiments
which are sure to come out as the law predicts.
The laws of personality and life are far more com-
plex, and each experiment discovers something
really novel and imique. The spiritual world is
ever-creative; the same experiments may turn
out differently for different experimenters, and
yet they may both be right. In the spiritual ex-
perimental life, we must have the attitude of the
scientist, but we are able to surpass him in daring
and boldness. We can be certain of a physical
law that as it has worked in the past, so it will
work in the future. But of a spiritual law we have
no such guarantee. This it is that gives the zest of
perpetual adventure to the moral life. Humannature is an exhaustless field for investigation and
experiment. It is inexhaustible in its richness
and variety.
The old rigid morality, with its emphasis on
the prudential virtues, neglected the fundamental
fact of our irrationality. It believed that if we
only knew what was good, we would do it. It was
therefore satisfied with telling us what was good,
and expecting us automatically to do it. But there
was a hiatus somewhere. For we do not do what
we want to, but what is easiest and most natural
243
YOUTH AND LIFE
for us to do, and if it is easy for us to do the wrong
thing, it is that thatwe will do. We are creatures of
instincts and impulses that we do not set going.
And education has never taught us more than
very imperfectly how to train these impulses in
accordance with our worthy desires. Instead of
endeavoring to cure this irrationality by directing
our energy into the channel of experimentation, it
has worked along the lines of greatest resistance,
and held up an ideal of inhibition and restraint.
We have beep alternately exhorted to stifle our
bad impulses, and to strain and struggle to make
good our worthy purposes and ambitions. Nowthe irrational man is certainly a slave to his im-
pulses, but is not the rational man a slave to his
motives and reasons.? The rational ideal has made
directly for inflexibility of character, a deadening
conservatism that is unable to adapt itself to situ-
ations, or make allowance for the changes and
ironies of life. It has riveted the moral life to logic,
when it should have been yoked up with sympa-
'thy. The logic of the heart is usually better than
the logic of the head, and the consistency of sym-
pathy is superior as a rule for life to the consistency
of the intellect.
Life is a laboratory to work out experiments in
Mi
THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE
living. That same freedom which we demand for
ourselves, we must grant to every one. Instead of
falling with our spite upon those who vary from
the textbook rules of life, we must look upon their
acts as new and very interesting hypotheses to be
duly tested and judged by the way they workwhen
carried out into action. Nonconformity, instead
of being irritating and suspicious, as it is now
to us, will be distinctly pleasurable, as affording
more material for our understanding of life and
our formulation of its satisfying philosophy. The
world has never favored the experimental life. It
despises poets, fanatics, prophets, and lovers.
It admires physical courage, but it has small use
for moral courage. Yet it has always been those
who experimented with life, who formed their
philosophy of life as a crystallization out of that
experimenting, who were the light and life of the
world. Causes have only finally triumphed when
the rational "gradual progress" men have been
overwhelmed. Better crude irrationality than the
rationality that checks hope and stifles faith.
In place, then, of the rational or the irrational
life, we preach the experimental life. There is
much chance in the world, but there is also a
modicum of free will, and it is this modicum that
245
YOUTH AND LIFE
we exploit to direct our energies. Recognizing the
precariousness and haphazardness of life, we can
yet generalize out of our experience certain prob-
abilities and satisfactions that will serve us as well
as scientific laws. Only they must be flexible and
they must be tested. Life is not a rich province to
conquer by our will, or to wring enjoyment out of
with our appetites, nor is it a market where we
pay our money over the coimter and receive the
goods we desire. It is rather a great tract of spirit-
ual soil, which we can cultivate or misuse. With
certain restrictions, we have the choice of the
crops which we can grow. Our duty is evidently
to experiment until we find those which grow
most favorably and profitably, to vary our crops
according to the quality of the soil, to protect
them against prowling animals, to keep the ground
clear of noxious weeds. Contending against wind
and weather and pests, we can yet with skill and
vigilance win a living for ourselves. None can
cultivate this garden of our personality but our-
selves. Others may supply the seed; it is we whomust plough and reap. We are owners in fee
simple, and we cannot lease. None can live my life
but myself. And the life that I live depends on mycourage, skill, and wisdom in experimentation.
XI
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
XI
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
Foe a truly sincere life one talent is needed, —the ability to steer clear of the forces that would
warp and conventionalize and harden the per-
sonality and its own free choices and bents. All the
kingdoms of this world lie waiting to claim the
allegiance of the youth who enters on the career
of life, and sentinels and guards stand ready to
fetter and enslave him the moment he steps un-
warily over the wall out of the free open road of
his own individuality. And unless he dodges them
and keeps straight on his path, dusty and barren
though it may be, he will find himself chained a
prisoner for life,' and little by little his own soul
will rot out of him and vanish. The wise men of the
past have often preached the duty of this open
road, they have summoned youth to self-reliance,
but they have not paid sufficient heed to the ene-
mies that would impede his progress. They have
been too intent on encouraging him to be inde-
pendent and lead his own life, to point out to him
the direction from which the subtle influences that
249
YOUTH AND LIFE
might control him would come. As a result, young
men have too often believed that they were hew-
ing out a career for themselves when they were
really simply oflfering themselves up to some insti-
tutional Moloch to.be destroyed, or, at the best,
passively allowing the career or profession they
had adopted to mould and carve them. Instead
of working out their own destiny, they were actu-
ally allowing an alien destiny to work them" out.
Youth enters the big world of acting and thinking,
a huge bundle of susceptibilities, keenly alive and
plastic, and so eager to achieve and perform that
it will accept almost the first opportunity that
comes to it. Now each youth has his own unique
personality and interweaving web of tendencies
and inclinations, such as no other person has ever
had before. It is essential that these trends and
abilities be so stimulated by experience that they
shall be developed to their highest capacity. Andthey can usually be depended upon, if freedom
and opportunity are given, to grow of them-
selves upward towards the sun and air. If a
youth does not develop, it is usually because his
nature has been blocked and thwarted by the
social pressures to which every one of us is sub-
jected, and which only a few have the strength
250
THE. DODGING OF PRESSURES
or the wisdom to resist. These pressures come
often in the guise of good fortune, and the youth
meets them halfway, goes with them gladly, and
lets them crush him. He will do it all, too, with
so easy a conscience, for is not this meeting the
world and making it one's own? It is meeting
the world, but it is too often only to have the
world make the youth its own.
Our spiritual guides and leaders, then, have
been too positive, too heartening, if such a thing
be possible. They have either not seen the dan-
gers that lurked in the path, or they have not
cared to discourage and depress us by pointing
them out. Many of our modern guides, in their
panegyrics on success, even glorify as aids on the
journey these very dangers themselves, and urge
the youth to rely upon them, when he should have
been warned not to gaze at all on the dazzling
lure. The youth is urged to imitate men who are
themselves victims of the very influences that he
should dodge, and doctrines and habits are pressed
upon him which he should ceaselessly question
and never once make his own unless he is sure
that they fit him. He will have need to be ever
alert to the dangers, and, in early youth at least,
would better think more of dodging them than of
251
YOUTH AND LIFE
attaining the goal to which his elders tempt him.
Their best service to him would be to warn him
against themselves and their influence, rather
than to encourage him to become like them.
The dangers that I speak of are the influences
and inducements which come to youth from fam-
ily, business, church, society, state, to compromise
with himself and become in more or less degree
conformed to their pattern and type. "Be like
us !" they all cry, "it is easiest and safest thus !
We guarantee you popularity and fortune at so
small a price,— only the price of your best self !
"
Thus they seduce him insidiously rather than
openly attack him. They throw their silky chains
over him and draw him in. Or they press gently
but ceaselessly upon him, rubbing away his orig-
inal roughness, polishing him down, moulding
him relentlessly, and yet with how kindly and
solicitous a touch, to their shape and manner. As
he feels their caressing pressure against him in the
darkness, small wonder is it that he mistakes it
for the warm touch of friends and guides. They
are friends and guides who always end, however,
by being masters and tyrants. They force him
to perpetuate old errors, to keep alive dying cus-
toms, to breathe new life into vicious prejudices,
252
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
to take his stand against the saving new. Theykill his soul, and then use the carcass as a barri-
cade against the advancing hosts of light. Theytrain him to protect and conserve their own out-
worn institutions when he should be the first, by
reason of his clear insight and freedom from
crusted prejudice, to attack them.
The youth's only salvation lies, then, in dodging
these pressures. It is not his business to make his
own way in life so much as it is to prevent some
one else from making it for him. His business
is to keep the way clear, and the sky open above
his head. Then he will grow and be nurtured
according to his needs and his inner nature. Hemust fight constantly to keep from his head those
coverings that institutions and persons in the
guise of making him warm and safe throw over
his body. If young people would spend half the
time in warding away the unfavorable influences
that they now spend in conscientiously planning
what they are going to be, they would achieve
success and maintain their individuality. It seems,
curiously enough, that one can live one's true
life and guarantee one's individuality best in this
indirect way,— not by projecting one's self out
upon the world aggressively, but by keeping the
253
YOUTH AND LIFE
track clear along which one's true life may run,
A sane, well-rounded, original life is attained not
so much by taking thought for it as by the dodg-
ing of pressures that would limit and warp its nat-
ural growth. The youth must travel the straight
road serenely, confident that "his own will come
to him." All he must strive for is to recognize his
own when it does come, and to absorb and assimi-
late it. His imagination must be large enough to
envisage himself and his own needs. This wis-
dom, however, comes to too many of us only after
we are hopelessly compromised, after we are en-
crusted over so deeply that, even if we try to
break away, our struggles are at the expense of
our gro'^h. The first duty of self-conscious youth
is to dodge the pressures, his second to survey the
world eagerly to see what is "his own." If he goes
boldly ahead at first to seek his own, without first
making provision for silencing the voices that
whisper continually at his side, " Conform !
" —he will soon find himself on alien ground, and, if
not a prisoner, a naturalized citizen before he
has time to think.
Nor is this a mere invitation to whimsicality
and eccentricity. These epithets, in our daily life,
are somewhat loosely used for all sorts of behavior
254
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
ranging from nonconformity to pure freakishness.
If we really had more original, unspoiled people in
the world, we should not use these terms so fre-
quently. If we really had more people who were
satisfying their healthy desires, and living the life
that their whole inner conscience told them was
best, we should not find eccentric or queer the
self-sustaining men and women who live without
regard to prejudice. And all real whimsicality
is a result rather of the thwarting of individual-
ity than of letting it run riot. It is when persons
of strong personality are subjected to pressures
heavier than they can bear that we get real out-
bursts of eccentricity. For something unnatural
has occurred, a spontaneous flow and progress has
been checked. Your eccentric man par excel-
lence is your perfectly conventional man, who
never offends in the slightest way by any original
action or thought. For he has yielded to every
variety of pressure that has been brought to bear
upon him,"and his original nature has been com-
pletely obscured. The pressures have been, how-
ever, uniform on every side, so that they have
seemingly canceled each other. But this equili-
brium simply conceals the forces that have
crushed him. The conventional person is, there-
255
YOUTH AND LIFE
fore, not the most natural but the most unnatural
of persons. His harmlessness is a proof of his
tremendous eccentricity. He has been rubbed
down smooth on all sides like a rock until he has
dropped noiselessly into his place in society. But
at what a cost does he obtain this peace ! At the
cost of depersonalizing himself, and sacrificing his
very nature, which, as in every normal person, is
precious and worthy of permanence and growth.
This treason to one's self is perhaps the greatest
mistake of youth, the one unpardonable sin. It is
worse than sowing one's wild oats, for they are
reaped and justice is done; or casting one's bread
upon the waters, for that returneth after many
days. But this sin is the throwing away in will-
fulness or carelessness the priceless jewel of self-
hood, and with no return, either of recompense or
punishment.
How early and insidious is the pressure upon
us to conform to some type whose fitness we
have not examined, but which we are forced to
take strictly on authority! On the children in the
family what a petty tyranny of ideas and manners
is imposed! Under the guise of being brought
up,howmany habits of doubtful valuewe learned,
how many moral opinions of doubtful significance
256
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
we absorbed, how many strange biases that harass
and perplex us in our later life we had fastened
upon our minds, how many natural and beautiful
tendencies we were forced to suppress! The tyr-
anny of manners, of conventional politeness, of
puritanical taboos, of superstitious religion, were
all imposed upon us for no reason that our elders
could devise, but simply that they in turn had
had them imposed upon them. Much of our early
education was as automatic and unconscious as
the handing down of the immemorial traditions in
a primitive savage tribe. Now I am far from say-
ing that this household tradition of manners and
morals is not an excellent thing for us to acquire.
Many of the habits are so useful that it is a wise
provision that we should obtain them as naturally
as the air we breathe. And it is a pressure that we
could not, at that age, avoid, even if we would.
But this childhood influence is a sample of true
pressure, for it is both unconscious and irresistible.
Were we to infringe any of the rules laid down for
us, the whole displeasure of the family descended
upon our heads; they seemed to vie with each
other in expressing their disapproval of our con-
duct. So, simply to retain our self-respect, we
were forced into their pattern of doing things,
257
YOUTH AND LIFE
and for no other reason than that it was their
pattern.
This early pressure, however, was mild in com-
parison with what we experienced as we grew
older. We found then that more and more of our
actions came insensibly but in some way or other
before this court of appeal. We could choose our
friends, for instance, only with reservations. If
we consorted with little boys who were not clean,
or who came from the less reputable portions of
the town, we were made to feel the vague family
disapproval, perhaps not outspoken, but as an
imdercurrent to their attitude. And usually we
did not need flagrantly to offend to be taught the
need of judicious selection, for we were sensitive
to the feeling that we knew those around us would
entertain, and so avoided the objectionable people
from a diffused feeling that they were not "nice."
When we grew old enough to move in the youthful
social world, we felt this circle of tyranny sud-
denly widen. It was our "set" now that dictated
our choices. The family pressure had been rather
subtle and uneasy; this was bold and direct. Here
were the most "arbitrary selections and disquali-
fications, girls and boys being banned for no
imaginable reason except that they were slightly
258
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
out of the ordinary, and our little world circum-
scribed by a rigid public opinion which punished
nonconformity by expulsion. If we tried to dodge
this pressure and assert our own privileges of
making lovers and friends, we were soon delivered
an ultimatum, and if we refused to obey, we were
speedily cast out into utter darkness, where,
strange to say, we lacked even the approbation of
the banned. Sometimes we were not allowed to
choose our partners to whom we paid our momen-
tary devotions, sometimes we were not allowed to
give them up. The price we paid for free partici-
pation in the parties and dances and love-affairs
of this little social world of youth was an almost
military obedience to the general feeling of pro-
priety and suitability of our relationships with
others, and to the general will of those in whose
circle we went. There was apt to be a rather
severe code of propriety, which bore especially
upon the girls. Many frank and natural actions
and expressions of opinion were thus inhibited,
from no real feeling of self-respect, but from the
vague, uncomfortable feeling that somebody
would not approve. This price for society was one
that we were all willing to pay, but it was a bad
training. Our own natural likings and dislikings
259
YOUTH AND LIFE
got blunted; we ceased to seek out our own kind
of people and enjoy them and ourselves in our own
way, but we "went with" the people that our
companions thought we ought to "go with," and
we played the games and behaved generally as
they thought we ought to do.
The family rather corroborated this pressure
than attempted to fortify us in our own individ-
uality. For their honor seemed to be involved
in what we did, and if all our walk in life was
well pleasing to those around us, they were well
pleased with us. And all through life, as long at
least as we were protected under the sheltering
wing of the family, its members constituted a sort
of supreme court over all our relations in life. In
resisting the other pressures that were brought to
bear on us, we rarely found that we had the fam-
ily's undivided support. They loved, like all social
groups, a smoothly running person, and as soon
as they found us doing unconventional things
or having unusual friends they were vaguely un-
easy, as if they were harboring in their midst
some unpredictable animal who would draw upon
them the disapproving glances of the society
around them. The family philosophy has a horror
for the "queer." The table-board is too often a
260
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
place where the eccentricities of the world get
thoroughly aired. The dread of deviation from
accepted standards is impressed upon us from our
youth up. The threat which always brought us to
terms was,— "If you do this, you will be con-
sidered queer!" There was very little fight left in
us after that.
But the family has other formidable weapons
for bringing us to terms. It knows us through and
through as none of our friends and enemies know
us. It sees us in undress, when all our outward
decorations of spirit and shams and pretenses are
thrown off, and it is not deceived by the apologies
and excuses that pass muster in the world at large
and even to our own conscience. We can conceal
nothing from it; it knows all our weakest spots
and vulnerable feelings. It does not hesitate to
take shameless advantage of that knowledge. Its
most powerful weapon is ridicule. It can adopt no
subtler method, for we in our turn know all its
own vulnerabilities. And where the world at
large is generally too polite to employ ridicule
upon us, but works with gentler methods of ap-
probation and coldness, our family associates feel
no such compunction. Knowing us as they do,
they are able to make that ridicule tell. We may261
YOUTH AND LIFE
have longings for freedom and individuality, but
it is a terrible dilemma that faces us. Most men
would rather be slaves than butts; they would
rather be corralled with the herd than endure its
taunts at their independence.
Besides the pressure on a youth or girl to think
the way the family does, there is often the pres-
sure brought upon them to sacrifice themselves
for its benefit. I do not mean to deprecate that
perfectly natural and proper desire to make some
return for the care and kindness that have been
lavished upon them. But the family insistence
often goes much further than this. It demands
not only that its young people shall recompense
it for what it has done for them, but that they
do it in the kind of work and vocation that shall
seem proper to it. How often, when the youth or
girl is on the point of choosing a congenial occu-
pation or profession, does the family council step
in and, with the utmost apparent good-will in
the world, dictate differently ! And too often the
motives are really policy or ambition, or, at best,
sheer prejudice. If the youth be not persuaded,
then he must bear the brunt of lonely toil with-
out the sympathy or support of those most dear
to him. Far harder is the lot of the young woman.
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
For there is still so much prejudice against a girl's
performing useful work in society, apart from her
God-given duty of gettiug married, that her ini-
tiative is crushed at the very beginning. Theneed of cultivating some piarticular talent or
interest, even if she has not to earn her living,
seems to be seldom felt. Yet women, with their
narrower life, have a greater need of sane and
vigorous spiritual habits than do men. It is im-
perative that a girl be prevented from growing
up into a useless, fleshly, and trivial woman, of
the type one sees so much of nowadays. Even if a
girl does marry, a few intellectual interests and
gifts and tastes will not be found to detract from
her charm or usefulness. The world never needed
so much as it does to-day women of large hearts
and large minds, whose home and sphere are
capable of embracing something beyond the four
corners of their kitchen. And the world can get
such women only by allowing then! the initiative
and opportunity to acquire varied interests and
qualities while they are young.
The family often forges sentimental bonds to
keep it living together long after the motive and
desire have departed. There is no group so un-
congenial as an uncongenial family. The constant
263
YOUTH AND LIFE
rubbing together accentuates all the divergencies
and misunderstandings. Yet sometimes a family
whose members are hopelessly mismated will cling
together through sheer inertia or through a con-
scientious feeling of duty. And duty to too many
of us is simply a stimulus to that curious love for
futile suffering that form sone of the darker qual-
ities of the puritan soul. Family duty may not
only warp and mutilate many a "life that would
bloom healthily outside in another environment,
but it may actually mean the pauperization of
the weaker members. The claims of members
of the family upon each other are often over-
whelming, and still more often quite fictitious in
their justice. Yet that old feeling of the indis-
solubility of the family will often allow the weak,
who might, if forced to shift for themselves, be-
come strong, to suck the lifeblood from the
stronger members. Cooperation, when it is free
and spontaneous and on a basis of congeniality, is
the foundation of all social life and progress, but
forced cohesion can do little good. The average
family is about as well mated as any similar group
would be, picked out at random from society.
And this means, where the superstition of indis-
solubility is still effective, that the members share
264
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
not only all the benefits, but also all each others'
shortcomings and irritations. Family life thus
not only presses upon its youth to conform to its
customs and habits and to the opinions of the
little social world in which it lives, but also drags
its youth down with its claims, and warps it by its
tension of uncongeniality, checks its spontaneity
by its lack of appreciation, and injures its soul by
friction and misunderstanding.
This family pressure upon youth is serious, and
potent for much good and evil in his later life. It
is necessary that he understand how to analyze it
without passion or prejudice, and find out just
how he can dodge the unfavorable pressure with-
out injury to the love that is borne him or the love
that he bears to the others. But let him not be-
lieve that his love is best shown by submission.
It is best shown by a resolute determination and
assertion of his own individuality. Only he must
know, without the cavil of a doubt, what that
individuality is; he must have a real imaginative
anticipation of its potentialities. Only with this
intuition will he know where to dodge and how
to dodge.
It is true that the modem generation seems to
be changing all this. Family cohesion and author-
265
YOUTH AND LIFE
ity no longer mean what they did even twenty
years ago. The youth of to-day are willful, selfish,
heartless, in their rebellion. They are changing
the system blindly and blunderingly. They feel
the pressure, and without stopping to ask ques-
tions or analyze the situation, they burst the
doors . and flee away. Their seeming initiative is
more animal spirits than anything else. They
have exploded the myth that their elders have
any superhuman wisdom of experience to share
with them, or any incontrovertible philosophy of
life with which to guide their wandering footsteps.
But it must be admitted that most have failed so
far to find a wisdom and a philosophy to take its
place. They have too often thrown away the bene-
fits of family influence on account of mere trivial-
ities of misunderstanding. They have not waited
for the real warpings of initiative, the real pres-
sure of prejudice, but have kicked up their heels
at the first breath of authority. They have not so
much dodged the pressure as fled it altogether.
Instead of being intent on brushing away the
annoying obstacles that interfered with the free
growth of their own worthier selves, they have
mistaken the means for the end, and have merely
brushed off the interferences, without first having
266
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
any consciousness of that worthier self. Now of
course this is no solution. It is only as they sub-
stitute for the authority that they throw off a
definite authority of their own, crystallized out
of their own ideals and purposes, that they will
gain or help others to gain. For lack of a vision
the people perish. For lack of a vision of their
own personalities, and the fresh, free, aggressive,
forward, fearless, radical life that we all ought to
lead, and could lead if we only had the imagina-
tion for it, the youth of to-day will cast off the
narrowing confining fetters of authority only to
wander without any light at all. This is not
to Say that this aimless wandering is not better
than the prison-house, but it is to say that the
emancipation of the spirit is insufficient without a
new means of spiritual livelihood to take its place.
The youth of to-day cannot rest on their libera-
tion; they must see their freedom as simply the
setting free of forces within themselves for a
cleaner, sincerer life, and for radical work in
society. The road is cut out before them by pio-
neers; they have but to let themselves grow out
in that direction.
I have painted the family pressures in this
somewhat lurid hue because they are patterns of
267
YOUTH AND LIFE
the other attacks which are made upon the youth
as he meets the world. The family is a little
microcosm, a sheltered group where youth feels
all those currents of influence that sway men in
their social life. Some of them are exaggerated,
some perverted, but they are most of them there
in that little world. It is no new discovery that in
family life one can find heaven or one can find
hell. The only pressure that is practically absent
in the family is the economic pressure, by which
I mean the inducements, and even necessities,
that a youth is under of conforming to codes or
customs and changing his ideals and ideas, when
he comes to earn his livelihood. This pressure
affects him as soon as he looks for an opening, as
he calls it, in which to make his living. At that
time all this talk of natural talents or bents or
interests begin to sound far-away and ideal. Hesoon finds that these things have no commercial
value in themselves and will go but a short way
towards providing him with his living. The ma-
jority of us "go to work" as soon as our short
"education" is completed, if not before, and we
go not by choice, but wherever opportunity is
given. Hence the ridiculous misfits, the apathy,
the restlessness and discontent. The world of
268
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
young people around us seems too largely to be
one where both men and girls are engaged in workin which they have no interest, and for which
they have no aptitude. They are mournfully
fettered to their work; all they can seem to do
is to make the best of it, and snatch out of
the free moments what pleasure and exhilaration
they can. They have little hope for a change.
There is too much of a scramble for places in
this busy, crowded world, to make a change any-
thing but hazardous. It is true that restlessness
often forces a change, but it is rarely for the
better, or in the line of any natural choice or in-
terest. One leaves one's job, but then one takes
thankfully the first job that presents itself; the
last state may be worse than the first. By this
economic pressure most of us are sidetracked,
turned oflF from our natural path, and fastened
irrevocably to some work that we could only
acquire an interest in at the expense of our
souls.
It is a pressure, too, that cannot easily be
dodged. We can frankly recognize our defeat,
plunge boldly at the worjc and make it a part of
ourselveg; this course of action, which most of us
adopt, is really, however, simply an unconditional
269
YOUTH AND LIFE
surrender. We can drift along apathetically, with-
out interest either in our work or our own person-
alities; this course is even more disastrous. Or
we can quietly wait until we have found the voca-
tion that guarantees the success of our personali-
ties; this course is an ideal that is possible to very
few. And yet, did we but know it, a little thought
at the beginning would often have prevented the
misfit, and a little boldness when one has dis-
covered the misfit would often have secured the
favorable change. That self-recognition, which
is the only basis for a genuine spiritual success in
life, is the thing that too many of us lack. The
apathy comes from a real ignorance of what our
true work is. Then we are twice a slave, — a prey
to our circumstance and a prey to our ignorance.
Like all discoveries, what one's work is can be
found only by experiment. But this can often
be an imaginative experiment. One can take an
"inventory of one's personality," and discover
one's interests, and the kind of activity one feels
at home with or takes joy in. Yet it is true that
there are many qualities which cannot be dis-
covered by the imagination, which need the fairy
touch of actual use to develop them. There is no
royal road to this success. Here the obstacles are
270
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
usually too thick to be dodged. We do not often
enough recognize the incredible stupidity of our
civilization where so much of the wofk is unin-
teresting and monotonous. That we should con-
sider it a sort of triumph that a man like Mr. John
Burroughs should have been able to live his life
as he chose, travel along his own highroad, and
develop himself in his own natural direction, is
a curious reflection on our ideals of success and
on the incompleteness of our civilization. Such
a man has triumphed, however, because he has
known what to dodge. He has not been crushed
by the social opinion of his little world, or lured by
specious success, or fettered by his "job," or
hoodwinked by prejudice. He has kept his spirit
clear and pure straight through life. It would
be well for modern youth if it could let an ideal
like this color their lives, and permeate all their
thoughts and ambitions. It would be well if they
could keep before them such an ideal as a pillar
of fire by day and a cloud by night.
If we cannot dodge this economic pressure, at
least we can face it. If we are situated so that
we have no choice in regard to our work, we may
still resist the influences which its uncongeniality
would bring to bear upon us. This is not done by
271
YOUTH AND LIFE
forcing an interest in it, or liking for it. If the
work is socially wasteful or useless or even per-
nicious, as so much business and industrial work
to-day is, it is our bounden duty not to be inter-
ested in it or to like it. We should not be playing
our right place in society if we enjoyed such a
prostitution of energies. One of the most insidi-
ous of the economic pressures is this awaking the
interest of youth in useless and wasteful work,
work that takes away energy from production to
dissipate in barter and speculation and all the
thousand ways that men have discovered of caus-
ing money to flow from one pocket to another
without the transference of any fair equivalent of
real wealth. We can dodge these pressures not by
immolating ourselves, but by letting the routine
work lie very lightly on our soul. We can under-
stand clearly the nature and effects of this use-
less work we are doing, and keep it from either
alluring or smothering us. We can cultivate a dis-
interested aloofness towards it, and keep from
breathing its poisonous atmosphere. The extra
hours we can fill with real interests, and make
them glow with an intensity that will make our
life almost as rich as if we were wholly given over
to a real lifework. We can thus live in two worlds,
272
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
one of which is the more precious because it is one
of freedom from very real oppression. And that
oppression will seem light because it has the re-
verse shield of liberty. If we do drudgery, it must
be our care to see that it does not stifle us. Theone thing needful in all our work and play is that
we should always be on top, that our true per-
sonality should always be in control. Our life
must not be passive, running simply by the mo-
mentum furnished by anotlier; it must have the
motive power within itself; although it gets the
fuel from the stimulation of the world about it,
the steam and power must be manufactured
within itself.
These counsels of aloofness from drudgery sug-
gest the possibilities of avoiding the economic
pressures where they are too heavy completely
to dodge, and where the work is an irrevocable
misfit. But the pressures of success are even more
deadly than those of routine. How early is one
affected by that first pressure of worldly opinion
which says that lack of success in business or a
profession is disgraceful ! The one devil of our
modern world is failure, and many are the
charms used by the medicine men to ward him
away. If we lived in a state of society where vir-
273
YOUTH AND LIFE
tue was its own reward, where our actions were
automatically measured and our rewards duly
proportioned to our efforts, a lack of success would
be a real indication of weakness and flaw, or, at
best, ill-preparation. But where business success
is largely dependent on the possession of capital,
a lucky risk, the ability to intimidate or deceive,
and where professional success is so often depend-
ent upon self-assertion or some irrelevant but
pleasing trait of personality, failure means no-
thing more than bad luck, or, at most, inability
to please those clients to whom one has made
one's appeal. To dodge this pressure of fancied
failure and humiliation is to have gone a long
way towards guaranteeing one's real success. Weare justified in adopting a pharisaical attitude
towards success,— "Lord, I thank thee that I
have not succeeded as other men have !
" To have
judged one's self by the inner standards of truth
to one's own personality, to count the conscious-
ness of having done well, regardless of the cor-
roboration of a public, as success, is to have
avoided this most discouraging of pressures.
It is even doubtful whether business or pro-
fessional success, except in the domain of science
and art, can be attained without a certain be-
274
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
trayal of soul. The betrayal may have been small,
but at some point one has been compressed, one
has yielded to alien forces and conformed to whatthe heart did not give assent to. It may be that
one has kept silent when one should have spoken,
that one has feigned interests and enthusiasms,
or done work that one knew was idle and useless,
in order to achieve some goal; but always that
goal has been reached not spontaneously but
under a foreign pressure. sMore often than not
the fortunate one has not felt the direct pressure,
has not been quite conscious of the sacrifice, but
only vaguely uneasy and aware that all was not
right within him, and has won his peace only
by drugging his uneasiness with visions of the
final triumph. The pressure is always upon him
to keep silent and conform. He must not only
adopt all the outward forms and ceremonies, as
in the family and social life, but he must also
adopt the traditional ideals.
The novice soon finds that he is expected to
defend the citadel, even against his own heresies.
The lawyer who finds anomalies in the law, in-
justice in the courts, is not encouraged to publish
abroad his facts, or make proposals for reform.
The student who finds antiquated method, erro-
275
YOUTH AND LIFE
neous hypotheses in his subject, is not expected
to use his knowledge and his genius to remodel
the study. The minister who comes upon new
and living interpretations for his old creeds is not
encouraged to speak forth the truth that is in
him. Nor is the business man who finds corrupt
practices in his business encouraged to give the
secrets away. There is a constant social pressure
on these "reformers" to leave things alone.
And this does not arise from any corrupt con-
nivance with the wrong, or from any sympathy
with the evildoers. The cry rises equally from the
corrupt and the holy, from the men who are re-
sponsible for the abuses and those who are inno-
cent, from those who know of them and those
who do not. It is simply the instinctive reaction
of the herd against anything that savors of the
unusual; it is the tendency of every social group
simply to resist change. This alarm at innovation
is universal, from college presidents to Catholic
peasants, in fashionable club or sewing circle or
political party. On the radical there is immedi-
ately brought, without examination, without rea-
son or excuse, the yrhple pressure of the organiz-
ation to stultify his vision and force him back into
the required grooves. The methods employed are
276
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
many: a warning is issued against him as being
unsound and unsafe; his motive is to maketrouble, or revenge himself on the directors for
some slight; finally he is solemnly pilloried as an
"enemy of the people." Excellent reasons are
discovered for his suppression. Effective working
of an organization requires coSperation, but also
subordination; in the interests of efficiency, there-
fore, individual opinion cannot be allowed full
sway. The reputation of the organization be-
fore the world depends on its presenting a harmo-
nious and imited front; internal disagreements
and criticisms tend to destroy the respect of the
public. Smoothness of working is imperative; a
certain individual liberty must, therefore, be sac-
rificed for the success of the organization. Andif these plausible excuses fail, there is always the
appeal to authority and to tried and tested ex-
perience. Now all these reasons are simply apolo-
gies brought up after the fact to justify the first
instinctive reaction. What they all mean is this,
and only this: He would unsettle things; away
with him
!
In olden times, they had sterner ways of en-
forcing these pressures. But although the stake
and dungeon have disappeared, the spirit of con^
277
YOUTH AND LIFE
servatism does not seem to have changed very
much. Educated men still defend the hoariest
abuses, still stand sponsor for utterly antiquated
laws and ideals. That is why the youth of this
generation has to be so suspicious of those who
seem to speak authoritatively. He knows not
whom he can trust, for few there are who speak
from their own inner conviction. Most of our
leaders and moulders of public opinion speak
simply as puppets pulled by the strings of the
conservative bigotry of their class or group. It is
well that the youth of to-day should know this,
for the knowledge will go far towards steeling
him against that most insidious form of pressure
that comes from the intellectual and spiritual
prestige of successful and honored men. Whenyouth sees that a large part of their success has
been simply their succumbing to social pressure,
and that their honor is based largely on the fact
that they do not annoy vested interests with pro-
posals or agitations for betterment, he will seek to
discover new standards of success, and find his
prophets and guides among the less fortunate,
perhaps, but among those who have retained their
real integrity. This numbing palsy of conserva-
tive assent which steals over so many brilliant
278
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
and sincere young men as they are subjected to
the influence of prestige and authority in their
profession is the most dangerous disease that
threatens youth. It can be resisted only by con-
stant criticism and candid vigilance. "Prove all
things; hold fast to that which is good," should
be the motto of the intellectual life. Only by
testing and comparing all the ideals that are pre-
sented to one is it possible to dodge that pressure
of authority that would crush the soul's original
enthusiasms and beliefs. Not doubt but conven-
tion is the real enemy of youth.
Yet these spiritual pressures are comparatively
easy to dodge when one is once awake to them.
It is the physical pressure that those in power
are able to bring to bear upon the dissenter that
constitutes the real problem. The weak man soon
becomes convinced of his hardihood and audacity
in supposing that his ideas could be more valua-
ble than the running tradition, and recants his
heresies. But those who stick stiff-neckedly out
are soon crushed. When the youth is settled in
life, has trained for his profession and burned his
bridges behind him, it means a great deal to com-
bat authority. For those in power can make use
of the economic pressure to force him to conform-
279
YOUTH AND LIFE
ity. It is the shame of our universities that they
are giving constant illustrations of this use of
arbitrary power, directed usually against noncon-
formity in social and political opinion. Recent
examples show the length to which even these sup-
posedly enlightened institutions are willing to go
to prevent social heresy in their midst. Often
such harsh measures are not needed. A subtle
appeal to a man's honor is effective. "While
you are a member of a society," it is said, "it is
your duty to think in harmony with its ideals
and policies. If you no longer agree with those
ideals, it is your duty to withdraw. You can fight
honorably for your own ideas only from the out-
side." All that need be said about this doctrine,
so fair and reasonable on the surface, is that it
contains all the philosophic support that would
perpetuate the evil of the world forever. For it
means attacking vested evil from the weakest
vantage-point; it means willfully withdrawing to
the greatest distance, shooting one's puny arrows
at the citadel, and then expecting to capture it.
It means also to deny any possibility of progress
within the organization itself. For as soon as
dissent from the common inertia developed, it
would be automatically eliminated. It is a prin-
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
ciple, of course, that plays directly into the hands
of the conservators. It is an appeal to honor that
is dishonorable. Let it seduce no man's sincerity!
The principal object of every organization, as
every youth soon discovers who feels dissatisfac-
tion with the policies of church, club, college, or
party, is to remain true to type. Each is organized
with a central vigilance committee, whose ostens-
ible function is direction, but whose real business
is to resist threatening change and keep matters
as they are. The ideal is smoothness; every part
of the machine is expected to run along in its
well-oiled groove. Youths who have tried to intro-
duce their new ideas into such organizations know
the weight of this fearful resistance. It seems
usually as if all the wisdom and experience of
these elders had taught them only the excellence
of doing nothing at all. Their favorite epithet
for those who have individual opinions is "trouble-
makers," forgetting that men do not run the risk
of the unpopularity and opprobrium that aggres-
siveness always causes, for the sheer love of mak-
ing trouble. Through an instinct of self-preserv-
ation, such an organization always places loyalty
above truth, the permanence of the organization
above the permanence of its principles. Even in
281
YOUTH AND LIFE
churches we are told that to alter one's opinion
of a creed to which one has once given allegiance
is basely to betray one's higher nature. These
are the pressures that keep wavering men in the
footpaths where they have once put their feet,
and stunts their truer, growing selves. Howmany souls a false loyalty has blunted none can
say; perhaps almost as many as false duty!
In the dodging of these pressures many a manfinds the real spiritual battle of his life. They are
a challenge to all his courage and faith. Unless
he understands their nature, his defeat will bring
despair or cynicism. When the group is weak and
he is strong, he may resist successfully, press
back in his turn, actually create a public opinion
that will support him, and transfuse it all with his
new spirit and attitude. Fortunate, indeed, is he
who can not only dodge these pressures but dis-
solve them! If he is weak and his efforts are use-
less, and the pressure threatens to crush him, he
would better withdraw and let the organization
go to its own diseased perdition. If he can remain
within without sacrifice to his principles, this is
well, for then he has a vantage-ground for the
enunciation of those principles. Eternal vigi-
lance, however, is the price of his liberty.
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
The secret ambition of the group seems to be to
turn out all its members as nearly alike as pos-
sible. It seeks to create a type to which all newadherents shall be moulded. Each group, then,
that we have relations with is ceaselessly working
to mould us to its type and pattern. It is this
marvellous unseen power that a group has of
forming after its own image all that come under
its influence, that conquers men. It has the two
instincts of self-preservation and propagation
strongly developed, and we tend unthinkingly to
measure its value in terms of its success in the
expression of those instincts. Rather should it
be measured always in terms of its ability to
create and stimulate varied individuality. This
is the new ideal of social life. This is what makes
it so imperative that young men of to-day should
recognize and dodge the pressures that would
thwart the assertion of this ideal. The aim of the
group must be to cultivate personality, leaving
open the road for each to follow his own. The
bond of cohesion will be the common direction
in which those roads point, but this is far from
saying that all the travelers must be alike. It
is enough that there be a common aim and a
common ideal.
283
YOUTH AND LIFE
Societies are rarely content with this, however;
they demand a close mechanical similarity, and a
conformity to a reactionary and not a progressive
type. If we would be resolute in turning our gaze
towards the common aim, and dodging the pres-
sure of the common pattern, our family, business,
and social life would be filled with a new spirit.
We can scarcely imagine the achievement and
liberation that would result. Individuality would
come to its own;jit would no longer be suspect.
Youth would no longer be fettered and bound, but
would come to its own as the leaven and even
leader of life. Men would worship progress as
they now worship stagnation; their ideal in work-
ing together would be a living effectiveness in-
stead of a mechanical efficiency.
This gospel is no call to ease and comfort. It is
rather one of peril. The youth of this generation
will not be so lightly seduced, or go so innocently
into the bonds of conservatism and convention,
under the impression that they are following the
inspired road to success. Their consciences will
be more delicate. They know now the dangers
that confront them and the road they are called
on to tread. It is not an easy road. It is be-
set with opportunities for real eccentricity, for
284
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
selfishness, for willfulness, for mere bravado. It
would be surprising, after the long premium that
has been placed on the pattern, not to see a reac-
tion in favor of sheer freakishness. Many of our
modern radicals are examples of this reaction.
Yet their method is so sound, their goal so clear
and noble, their spirit so sincere, that they are
true pioneers of the new individuality. Their
raciness is but the raciness of all pioneers every-
where. And much of their irresponsibility is a
result of that intolerable pressure against which
they are revolting. They have dodged it, but it
dogs them and concentrates itself sullenly behind
them to punish them for their temerity. The
scorn of the world hurts and hampers them. That
ridicule which the family employed against devi-
ation is employed in all large social movements
against the innovators. Yet slowly and siu-ely
the new social ideal makes its way.
It is not a call to the surrendering of obligations,
in family or business or profession, but it is a call
to the criticism of obligations. Youth must dis-
tinguish carefully between the essential duties
and the non-essential, between those which make
for the realization of the best common ideals, and
those which make merely for the maintenance of a
285
YOUTH AND LIFE
dogma or unchalleilged superstition. By resisting
the pressures that would warp, do we really best
serve society; by allowing our free personality to
develop, do we contribute most to the commongood. We must recognize that our real duty is
always found runniug in the direction of our
worthiest desires. No duty that runs rough-shod
over the personality can have a legitimate claim
upon us. We serve by being as well as by doing.
It is easy to distort this teaching into a counsel
to unbridled selfishness. And that, of course, is
the risk. But shall we not dare to take the risk?
It may be also that in our care to dodge the pres-
sures, we may lose all the inestimable influences
of good that come along mixed in with the hurtful.
But shall we not take the risk.? Our judgments
can only grow by exercise; we can only learn
by constantly discriminating. Self-recognition is
necessary to know one's road, but, knowing the
road, the price of the mistakes and perils is worth
paying. The following of that road will be all the
discipline one needs. Discipline does not mean
being moulded by outside forces, but sticking to
one's road against the forces that would deflect
or bury the soul. People speak of finding one's
niche in the world. Society, as we have seen, is
286
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind
of a statue it likes, and then placing it in the most
convenient niche it has. But for us, not the niche
but the open road, with the spirit always travel--
ing, always criticizing, always learning, always
escaping the pressures that threaten its integrity.
With its own fresh power it will keep strong and
true to the journey's end.
XII
FOR RADICALS
XII
FOR RADICALS
The great social movement of yesterday and to-
day and to-morrow has hit us of the younger gen-
eration hard. Many of us were early converted
to a belief in the possibilities of a regenerated
social order, and to a passionate desire to do some-
thing in aid of that regeneration. The appeal is
not only to bur sympathy for the weak and ex-
ploited, but also to our delight in a healthy, free,
social life, to an artistic longing for a society
where the treasures of civilization may be open
to all, and to our desire for an environment where
we ourselves will be able to exercise our capaci-
ties, and exert the untrammeled influences which
we believe might be ours and our fellows'. All
these good things the social movement seems to
demand and seems to offer, and its appeal is irre-
sistible. Before the age of machinery was devel-
oped, or before the structure of our social system
and the relations between classes and individuals
was revealed, the appeal might have been merely
sentimental. But it is no longer so. The aims of
291
YOUTH AND LIFE
the social movement to-day seem to have all the
tremendous power of a practicable ideal. Tothe satisfactions which its separate ideals give
to all the finer instincts of men is added the
overwhelming conviction that those satisfactions
are most of them realizable here and now by con-
certed methods which are already partly in oper-
ation and partially successful. It is this union
of the idealistic and the efficient that gives the
movement its hold on the disinterested and seri-
ous youth of to-day.
With that conversion has necessarily come the
transvaluation of many of our social values. Nolonger can we pay the conventional respect to suc-
cess or join in the common opinions of men and
causes. The mighty have been pulled down from
their seats, and those of low degree exalted. Wefeel only contempt for college presidents, editors,
and statesmen who stultify their talents and per-
vert their logical and historical knowledge in
defending outworn political philosophies and
economic codes. We can no longer wholly believe
in the usefulness or significance of those teachers
and writers who show themselves serenely obliv-
ious to the social problems. We become keen
analysts of the society around us; we put uncom-
FOR RADICALS
fortable questions to our sleek and successful
elders. We criticize the activities in which they
engage, the hitherto sacred professions and busi-
nesses, and learn to distinguish carefully between
actually productive work for society, work which
makes for the material and spiritual well-being of
the people for whom it is done, and parasitic or
wasteful work, which simply extends the friction
of competition, or lives on the labor or profits of
others. We distinguish, too, between the instruc-
tion and writing that consists iu handing down
unexamined and uncriticized moral and political
ideas, and ideas that let in the fresh air and sun-
light to the thick prejudices of men. We come to
test the papers we read, the teachers we learn
from, the professional men we come into contact
with, by these new standards. Various and sur-
prising are the new interweavings we discover,
and the contrasts and ironies of the modern intel-
lectual life. The childlike innocence in which so
many seem still to slumber is almost incredible
to those whose vision is so clear. The mechanical
way in which educated men tend to absorb and
repeat whole systems of formulas is a constant
surprise to those whose ideas hum and clash and
react against each other. But the minds of so
YOUTH AND LIFE
many of these men of position seem to run in
automatic channels, such that, given one set of
opinions, one could predict with accuracy their
whole philosophy of life. Our distrust of their
whole spiritual fabric thus becomes fundamental.
We can no longer take most of them seriously.'
It is true that they are doing the serious work of
the world, while we do nothing as yet except crit-
icize, and perhaps are doomed to fail altogether
when we try. To be sure, it is exactly their way
of doing that serious work that we object to, but
still we are the dreamers, they the doers; we are
the theorists, they the practical achievers. Yet
the precision of our view will not down; we can
see in their boasted activity little but a resolute
sitting on the lid, a sort of glorified routine of
keeping the desk clear. And we would rather
remain dreamers, we feel, than do much of their
work. Other values we find are changed. We be-
come hopelessly perverted by democracy. We no
longer make the careful distinctions between the
fit and the unfit, the successful and the unsuc-
cessful, the effective and the ineffective, the
presentable and the unpresentable. We are more
interested in the influences that have produced
these seeming differences than in the fact of the
294
FOR RADICALS
differences themselves. We classify people by newcategories. We look for personality, for sincerity,
for social sympathy, for democratic feeling, for
social productiveness, and we interpret success
in terms of these attainments.
The young radical, then, in such a situation and
in possession of these new social values, stands
on the verge of his career in a mood of great per-
plexity. Two questionshe must answer,—"Whatis to be done? " and "What must I do.'' " If he has
had an education and is given a real opportunity
for the choice of a vocation, his position is crucial.
For his education, if it has been in one of the
advanced universities, will have only tended to
confirm his radicalism and render more vivid the
contrast between the new philosophy which is be-
ing crystallized there out of modern science and
philosophy and the new interpretations of history
and ethics, and the obscurantist attitude of so
many of our intellectual guardians. The youth,
ambitious and aggressive, desires an effective and
serviceable career, yet every career open to him
seems a compromise with the old order. If he has
come to see the law as an attempt to fit immutable
principles of social action on a dynamic and ever-
growing society; if he has come to see the church
295
YOUTH AND LIFE
as an organization working along the lines of
greatest spiritual resistance, preaching a personal
where the world is crying for a social gospel; if he
has come to see higher education as an esoteric
institution of savants, only casually reaching
down to touch the mass of people with theirknow-
ledge and ideas; if he has come to see business as a
clever way of distributing unearned wealth, and
the levying of a refined tribute on the property-
less workers; if he has come to see the pr6ss as
devoted to bolstering up all these institutions in
their ineflSiciency and inertia;— if he has caught
this radical vision of the social institutions about
him, he will find it hard to fit neatly into any of
them and let it set its brand upon him. It would
seem to be a treason not only to society but to his
own best self. He would seem to have become
one of the vast conspiracy to keep things as they
are. He has spent his youth, perhaps, in studying
things as they are in order to help in changing
them into things as they ought to be, but he is
now confronted with the question how the change
can be accomplished, and how he can help in that
accomplishment.
The attempt to answer these questions seems
at first to bring him to a deadlock and to inhibit
FOR RADICALS
all his powers. He desires self-development and
self-expression, and the only opportunities offered
him seem to be ways of life and training that will
only mock the best social ideals that he has. This
is the dilemma of latter-day youth, and it is a
dilemma which is new and original to our ownage. Earnest men and women have always had
before them the task of adjusting themselves to
this world, of "overcoming the world," but the
proper method has always been found in with-
drawing from it altogether, or in passing through
it with as little spot and blemish as possible, not
in plunging into its activity and attempting to
subjugate it to one's ideals. Yet this is the task
that the young radical sets for himself. Subjuga-
tion without compromise! But so many young
men and women feel that this is impossible. Con-
fident of their sincerity, yet distrustful of their
strength, eager yet timorous, they stand on the
brink, longing to serve, but not knowing how, and
too likely, through their distrust and fears, to
make a wreck of their whole lives. They feel
somehow that they have no right to seek their
own welfare or the training of their own talents
until they have paid that service to society which
they have learned is its due.
297
YOUTH AND LIFE
It does not do to tell them that one of their
best services will be that training. They demand
some moce direct way of influencing their fellows,
some short road to radical activity. It would be
good for them to know that they cannot hope to
accomplish very much in radiating their ideals
without the skill and personality which gives
impetus to that radiation. Good-will alone Jbas
little eflScacy. For centuries well-wishers of menhave shown a touching faith in the power of pure
ideals to propagate themselves. The tragic fail-
ures of the beginnings of the social movement it-
self were largely due to this belief. Great efforts
ended only in sentimentality. But we have no
intention now that the fund of intellectual and
spiritual energy liberated by radical thought in
the younger generation shall die away in such
ineffective efforts. To radiate influence, one's
light must shine before men, and it must glow,
moreover, with a steady and resolute flame, or
men will neither see nor believe the good works
that are being done.
It would be an easy way out of the dilemma if
we could all adopt the solution of Eropotkin, the
Russian radical writer, and engage in radical
journalism. This seems to be the most direct
298
FOR RADICALS
means of bringing one's ideals to the people, to be
a real fighting on the firing line. It is well to
remember, however, that a weak propagandist
is a hindrance rather than an assistance, and that
the social movement needs the best of talent, and
the skill. This is a challenge to genius, but it is
also a reminder that thosewho fight in other ranks
than the front may do as valiant and worthy serv-
ice. One of the first lessons the young radical
has to learn is that influence can be indirect as
well as direct, and will be strongest when backed
by the most glowing personality. So that self-
cultivation becomes almost a duty, if one wants to
be effective towards the great end. And not only
personality but prestige; for the prestige of the
person from whom ideals come is one of the strong-
est factors in driving home those ideas to the
mind of the hearer and making them a motive
force in his life. Vested interests do not hesitate
to make use of the services of college presidents
and other men of intellectual prestige to give their
practices a philosophic support; neither should
radicals disdain, as many seem to disdain, the use
of prestige as a vantage-ground from which to
hurl their dogmas. Even though Kropotkin him-
self deprecated his useless learning, his scientific
299
YOUTH AND LIFE
reputation has been a great factor in spreading his
radical ideas.
It is the fashion among some radicals to despise
the applause of the conventional, unthinking
mass, and scorn any success which has that ap-
preciation as an ingredient. But this is not the
way to influence that same crass, unthinking mass
or convert it to one's doctrines. It is to alienate
at the beginning the heathen to whom the gospel
is being brought. And even the radical has the
right to be wise as a serpent and harmless as a
dove. He must see merely that his distinctiveness
is based on real merit and not, as many reputa-
tions are, on conformity to an established code.
Scientific research, engineering, medicine, and any
honest craft, are vocations where it is hard to win
prestige without being socially productive; their
only disadvantage lies in the fact that their ac-
tivity does not give opportunity for the influ-
ence of the kind the radical wishes to exert. Art,
literature, and teaching are perilous; the pressures
to conform are deadly, but the triumphs of indi-
viduality splendid. For one's daily work lies there
directly in the line of impressing other minds.
The genius can almost swing the lash over men's
spirits, and form their ideas for them ; he combines
300
FOR RADICALS
enormous prestige with enormous direct influence.
Law, the ministry, and business seem to be pecul-
iarly deadly; it is hard to see how eminence can
be attained in those professions except at the cost
of many of one's social ideals.
The radical can thus choose his career with full
knowledge of the social possibilities. Where he is
forced by economic necessity to engage in dis-
tasteful and unsocial work, he may still leave no
doubt, in the small realm he does illuminate, as to
his attitude and his purpose, his enthusiasm and
his hope. For all his powers and talents can be
found to contribute something; fusing together
they form his personality and create his prestige,
and it is these that give the real impetus and the
vital impulse that drive one's beliefs and ideals
into the hearts of other men. If he speaks, he will
be listened to, for it is faith and not doubt that
men strain their ears to hear. It is the believing
word that they are eager to hear. Let the social
faith be in a youth, and it will leak out in every
activity of his life, it will permeate his words and
color his deeds. The belief and the vision are the
essentials; these given, there is little need for him
to worry how he may count in society. He will
count in spite of himself. He may never know
301
YOUTH AND LIFE
just how he is counting, he may never hear the
reverberations of his own personality in others,
but reverberate it will, and the timbre and reso-
nance will be in proportion to the quality and
power of that vision.
The first concrete duty of every youth to whomsocial idealism is more than a phrase is to see that
he is giving back to society as much as or more
than he receives, and, moreover, that he is a
nourisher of the common life and not a drain upon
its resources. This was Tolstoy's problem, and
his solution to the question— "What is to be
done.''" — was— "Get off the other fellow's
back!" His duty, he found, was to arrange his
life so that the satisfaction of his needs did not
involve the servitude or the servility of any of his
fellow men; to do away with personal servants,
and with the articles of useless luxury whose pro-
duction meant the labor of thousands who might
otherwise have been engaged in some productive
and life-bringing work; to make his own living
either directly from the soil, or by the cooperative
exchange of services, in professional, intellectual,
artistic, or handicraft labor. Splendidly sound
as this solution is, both ethically and economically,
the tragic fact remains that so inextricably are
302
FOR RADICALS
we woven into the social web that we cannot live
except in some degree at the expense of somebody
else, and that somebody is too often a man, wo-
man, or even little child who gives grudgingly,
painfully, a stint of labor that we may enjoy. Wedo not see the labor and the pain, and with easy
hearts and quiet consciences we enjoy what we
can of the good things of life; or, if we see the
truth, as Tolstoy saw it, we still fancy, like him,
that we have it m our power to escape the curse
by simple living and our own labor. But the very
food we eat, the clothes we wear, the simplest
necessities of life with which we provide ourselves,
have their roots somewhere, somehow, in exploit-
ation and injustice. It is a cardinal necessity of
the social system under which we live that this
should be so, where the bulk of the work of the
world is done, not for human use and happiness,
but primarily and directly for the profits of mas-
ters and owners. We are all tainted with the orig-
inal sin; we cannot escape our guilt. And we can
be saved out of it only by the skill and enthusiasm
which we show in our efiforts to change things.
We cannot help the poisonous soil from which our
sustenance springs, but we can be laboring might-
ily at agitating that soil, ploughing it, turning it,
•303
YOUTH AND LIFE
and sweetening it, against the day when new seed
will be planted and a fairer fruitage be produced.
The solution of these dilemmas of radical youth
wUl, therefore, not come from a renunciation of
the personality or a refusal to participate actively
in life. Granted the indignation at our world as
it is, and the vision of the world as it might and
ought to be, both the heightening of all the powers
of the personality and a firm grappling with some
definite work-activity of life are necessary to make
that indignation powerful and purging, and to
transmute that vision into actual satisfaction for
our own souls and those of our fellows. It is a
fallacy of radical youth to demand all or nothing,
and to view every partial activity as compromise.
Either engage in something that will bring revo-
lution and transformation all at one blow, or do
nothing, it seems to say. But compromise is really
only a desperate attempt to reconcile the irrecon-
cilable. It is not compromise to study to under-
stand the world in which one lives, to seek expres-
sion for one's inner life, to work to harmonize it
and make it an integer, nor is it compromise to
work in some small sphere for the harmonization
of social life and the relations between men who
work together, a harmonization that will bring
304
FOR RADICALS
democracy into every sphere of life, industrial and
social.
Radical youth is apt to long for some supreme
sacrifice and feels that a lesser surrender is worth
nothing. But better than sacrifice is efficiency! It
is absurd to stand perplexedly waiting for the
great occasion, unwilling to make the little efforts
and test the little occasions, and unwilling to work
at developing the power that would make those
occasions great. Of all the roads of activity that
lie before the youth at the threshold of life, one
paramount road must be taken. This fear that
one sees so often in young people, that, if they
choose one of their talents or interests or oppor-
tunities of influence and make themselves in it
"competent ones of their generation," they must
slaughter all the others, is irrational. It is true
that the stern present demands singleness of pur-
pose and attention. A worthy success is impossible
to-day if the labor is divided among many inter-
ests. In a more leisurely time, the soul could en-
compass^many fields, and even to-day the genius
may conquer and hold at once many spiritual
kingdoms. But this is simply a stern challenge
to us all to make ourselves geniuses. For serious
and sincere as the desire of radical youth may305
YOUTH AND LIFE
be to lead the many-sided life, a life without a
permanent core of active and productive interest,
of efficient work in the world, leads to dilettant-
ism and triviality. Such efficient work, instead of
killing the other interests of life, rather fertilizes
them and makes them in turn enrich the central
activity. Instead of feeding on their time, it
actually creates tinae for the play of the other
interests, which is all the sweeter for its precious-
ness.
Always trying to make sure that the work, apart
from the inevitable taint of exploitation which is
involved in modem work, is socially productive,
that it actually in some way contributes to the
material or spiritual welfare of the people for
whom it is done, and does not simply reiterate
old formulas, does not simply extend the friction
of competition or consist simply in living on the
labor and profits of others. Such work cannot be
found by rule. The situation is a real dilemma for
the idealistic youth of to-day, and its solution is
to be wbrked out in the years to come. It is these
crucial dilemmas that make this age so difficult
to live in, that make life so hard to harmonize and
integrate. The shock of the crassnesses and crud-
ities of the modern social world thrown against
306
FOR RADICALS
the conventionally satisfying picture which that
world has formed of itself makes any young life of
pmpose and sincerity a real peril and adventure.
There are all sorts of spiritual disasters lying in
wait for the youth who embarks on the perUbus
ocean of radicalism. The disapproval of those
around him is likely to be the least of his dan-
gers. It should rather fortify his soul than dis-
courage him. Far more dangerous is it fchat he
lose his way on the uncharted seas before him, or
follow false guides to shipwreck. But the solution
is not to stay at home, fearful and depressed. It is
rather to cultivate deliberately the widest know-
ledge, the broadest sympathy, the keenest insight,
the most superb skill, and then set sail, exulting
in one's resources, and crowding on every inch
of sail.
For if the radical life has its perils, it also has its
great rewards. The strength and beauty of the
radical's position is that he already to a large
extent lives in that sort of world which he desires.
Many people there are who would like to live in
a world arranged in some sort of harmony with
socialistic ideals, but who, believing they are
impossible, dismiss the whole movement as an idle
if delightful dream. They thus throw away all the
307
YOUTH AND LIFE
opportunity to have a share in the extending of
those ideals. They do not see that the gradual
infiltration of those ideals into our world as it is
does brighten and sweeten it enormously. They
do not know the power and advantage of even
their "little faith" which their inclinations might
give them. But the faith of the radical has already
transformed the world in which he lives. He sees
the "muddle" around him, but what he actually
feels and lives are the germs of the future. His
mind selects out the living, growing ideas and
activities of the socially fruitful that exist here and
now, and it is with these that his soul keeps com-
pany; it is to their growth and cultivation that he
is responsive. This is no illusion that he knows, no
living in a pleasing but futile world of fancy. For
this living the socialistic life as far as he is able, he
believes has its eflBcient part in creating that com-
munal life of the future. He feels himself, not as
an idle spectator of evolution, but as an actual
co-worker in the process. He does not wait tim-
idly to jump until all the others are ready to jump
;
he jumps now, and anticipates that life which all
desire, but which most, through inertia, prejudice,
insuflScient knowledge, and feeble sympathy, dis-
trust or despair of. He knows that the world runs
308
FOR RADICALS
largely on a principle of imitation, and he launches
boldly his personality into society, confident of its
effect in polarizing the ideas and attitudes of the
wistful. Towards himself he finds gravitating the
sort of people that he would find in a regenerated
social order. To him come instinctively out of his
reading and his listening the ideas and events that
give promise of the actual realization of his ideals.
In unlooked-for spots he finds the seeds of regen-
eration already here. In the midst of the sternest
practicalities he finds blossoming those activities
and personalities which the unbelieving have
told him were impossible in a human world. And
he finds, moreover, that it is these activities and
personalities that furnish all the real joy, the real
creation, the real life of the present. The pro-
phets and the teachers he finds are with him. In
his camp he finds all those writers and leaders
who sway men's minds to-day and make their life,
all unconscious as they are of the revolutionary
character of the message, more rich and dynamic.
To live this life of his vision practically here in
the present is thus the exceeding great reward
of radical youth. And this life, so potent and
glowing amongst the crude malignity of modemlife, fortifies and stimulates him, and gives him
309
YOUTH AND LIFE
the surety, which is sturdier than any dream or
hope, of the coming time when this life will per-
meate and pervade all society instead of only a
part.
XIII
THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW
xni
THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW
The underfgraduate of to-day, if he reads the mag-
azmes, discovers that a great many people are
worrying steriously about his condition. College
presidents and official investigators are discuss-
ing his sch{j)larship, his extra-curricular activities,
and his moral stamina. Not content with the
surface of the matter, they are going deeper and
are investigating the college itself, its curricu-
lum, the scholarship of the instructors, and its
adequacy in realizing its high ideal as a prepara-
tion for life. The undergraduate finds that these
observers are pretty generally inclined to exoner-
ate him for many of his shortcomings, and to lay
the blame on the college itself; the system is in-
dicted, and not the helpless product.
For this he is grateful, and he realizes that this
dissatisfaction among educators, this imeasy
searching of the academic heart, promises well for
the education of his children, and for himself if he
remains in college long enough to get the benefit
of the reforms. Meanwhile, as he attends recita-
313
YOUTH AND LIFE
tions and meetings of undergraduaf® societies
talks with his fellow students and thf professorS;
and reads the college papers, he m|^y» even il
he can get no hint of the mysterious jJmer circles
where the destinies of the students are; shaped and
great questions of policy decided, be .^"'^ himseli
to see some of the things jthat complt^^^^e college
scholarship to-day, from an inner po™* of vie\v
which is impossible to the observer loP™^S dowi
from above. He may find in the cHar^^^er of tm
student body itself, and the way in #hich it re-
acts to what the college offers it, kn e^xplanatior
of some of the complications of sc^hol^'^ship thai
so disturb our critics; and in a ce^tairi' ^^^w qual
ity in the spirit of the college, sometlf^^S ^"^^^ ^'
beginning to crystallize his own ideM^' ®^d tc
make him coimt himself fortunate thr* ^^ is re-
ceiving his education in this age and nP other. Ir
the constitution of college society, s'^" ™ t^*
intellectual and spiritual ideals of tB^ teachers,
he may find the explanation of why tH^ college is
as it is, and the inspiration of what if"® college
ought to be and is coming to be. \
The first thing that is likely to iniPress the
undergraduate is the observation tha* college
society is much less democratic than ilt used tc
314
THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW
be. It is to be expected, of course, that it will
be simply an epitome of the society roimd about
it. But the point is, that whereas tiie college of
the past was probably more democratic than the
society about it, the present-day college is very
much less democratic. Democracy does not re-
quire uniformity, but it does require a certain
homogeneity, and the college to-day is less homo-
geneous than that of our fathers. For the growiag
preponderance of the cities has meant that an
ever-increasing proportion of city-bred men go
to college, in contrast to the past, when the menwere drawn chiefly from the small towns and
coimtry districts. Since social distinctions are
very much more sharply marked in the city than
in the country, this trend has been a potent in-
fluence in undemocratizing the college. In ordin-
ary city life these distinctions are not yet, at
least, insistent enough to cause any particular
class feeling, but in the ideal world of college life
they become aggravated, and suflSciently acute
to cause much misunderstanding and ill-feeling.
With increasing fashionableness, the small col-
lege, until recently the stronghold of democracy,
is beginning to succumb, and to acquire all those
delicately devised, subtle forms of snobbery which
315
YOUTH AND LIFE
have hitherto characterized the life of the Iarg(
college. If this tendency continues, the large col
lege will have a decided advantage as a prepara
tion for life, for as a rule it is situated in a larg(
city, where the environment more nearly approx
imates the environment of after life than does th(
artificial and sheltered life of the small college.
The presence of aliens in large numbers in th(
big colleges, and increasingly in the smaller col
leges, is an additional factor in complicating th(
social situation. It ought not to be ignored, fo:
it has important results in making the colleg(
considerably less democratic even than wouk
otherwise be the case. It puts the American rep
resentatives on the defensive, so that they drav
still more closely together for self-defense, anc
pull more tightly their lines of vested interes
and social and political privilege. The prejudic(
of race can always be successfully appealed to ir
undergraduate matters, even to the extent o:
beguiling many men with naturally democratic
consciences into doing things which they woulc
murmur at if called on to do as individuals, anc
not as the protectors of the social prestige of th(
college. The fraternities are of course the centre
of this vast political system which fills the ath-
316
THE COLLEGE : AN INNER VIEW
letic managerships, selects members of the socie-
ties, oflScers of classes and clubs, editors and as-
sistants of publications, and performs generally
all that indispensable public service of excluding
the aliens, the unpresentable, and the generally
unemployable from activity.
Iam aware that most of the colleges pride them-
selves on the fact that the poor man has an equal
chance with the rich to-day to win extra-curricu-
lar honors, and mingle in college society on a per-
fect plane of social equality with the best. It is
true, of course, that in college as in real life the
exceptional man will always rise to the top. But
this does not alter the fact that there exists at too
many American colleges a wholesale disfranchise-
ment from any participation in the extra-curricu-
lar activities, that is not based on anyrecognizable
principle of talent or ability. It is all probably
inherent in the nature of things, and to cavil at it
sets ojie down as childish and unpractical. At pre-
sent it certainly seems inevitable and unalterable.
The organized efforts of the President recently to
democratize the social situation at Princeton met
with such dull, persistent hostility on the part of
the alumni that they had to be abandoned.
This social situation in the college is not very
317
YOUTH AND LIFE
often mentioned in the usual discussions of col-
lege problems, but I have dwelt on it here at
length because I believe that it has a direct bear-
ing on scholarship. For it creates an eternal and
irreconcilable conflict between scholarship and ex-
tra-curricular activities. Scholarship is fundamen-
tally democratic. Before the bar of marks and
grades, penniless adventurer and rich man's son
stand equal. In college society, therefore, with
its sharply marked social distinctions, scholarship
fails to provide a satisfactory field for honor and
reputation. This implies no dislike to scholar-
ship as such on the part of the ruling class in col-
lege society, but means simply that scholarship
forces an unwelcome democratic standard on a
naturally undemocratic society. This class turns
therefore to the extra-curricular activities as a su-
perior field for distinction, a field where honor will
be done a man, not only for his ability, but for the
undefinable social prestige which he brings along
with him to college from the outside world. There
is thus a division of functions,— the socially fit
take the fraternities, the managerships, the pub-
lications, the societies; the unpresentable take
the honors and rewards of scholarship. Each class
probably gets just what it needs for after life.
318
THE COLLEGE : AN INNER VIEW
The division would thus be palpably fair were it
not for the fact that an invidious distinction gets
attached to the extra-curricular activities, which
turns the energy of many of the most capable
and talented men, men with real personality and
powers of leadership, men without a taint of
snobbery, into a mad scramble for these outside
places, with consequent, but quite unintentional,
bad effects on their scholarship.
The result of all this is, of course, a general lower-
ing of scholarship in the college. The ruling class
iscontent with passing marks, and has no ambition
to excel in scholarship, for it does not feel that the
attainment of scholars' honors confers the dis-
tinctions upon it that it desires. In addition, this
listlessness for scholarship serves to retard the
work of the scholarly portion of the classes; it
makes the instructor work harder, and clogs up
generally the work of the course. This listless-
ness may be partly due to another factor in the
situation. An ever larger proportion of college
students to-day comes from the business class,
where fifty years ago it came from the profes-
sional class. This means a difference between the>
intellectual background of the home that the man
leaves and of the college to which he comes, very'
319
YOUTH AND LIFE
much greater than when college training was still
pretty much the exclusive property of the profes-
sional man or the solid merchant, and almost an
hereditary matter. For, nowadays, probably a
majority of undergraduates are sent to college
by fathers who have not had a college education
themselves, but who, reverencing, as all Ameri-
cans do. Education if not Learning, are ambitious
that their sons shall have its benefits. These par-
ents can well afford to set their sons up hand-
somely so that they shall lose nothing of the well-
rounded training that makes up college life; and
although it is doubtful whether their idea of the
result is much more than a vague feeling that col-
lege will give their boys tone, and polish them off
much in the way that the young ladies' boarding-
school polishes off the girls, they are a serious
factor to be reckoned with in any discussion of
college problems.
Most of these young riien come thus from homes
of conventional religion, cheap literature, and
lack of intellectual atmosphere, bring few intel-
lectual acquisitions with them, and, since they
are most of them going into business, and will
therefore make little practical use of these acquisi-
tions in after life, contrive to carry a minimum320
THE COLLEGE : AN INNER VIEW
away with them. In the college courses and talks
with their instructors they come into an intellect-
ual atmosphere that is so utterly different from
what they have been accustomed to that, instead
of an intellectual sympathy between instructor
and student, there ensues an intellectual struggle
that is demoralizing to both. The instructor has
sometimes to carry on a veritable guerilla warfare
of new ideas against the pupils in his courses, with
a disintegrating effect that is often far from happy.
If he does not disintegrate, he too often stiffens
the youth, if of the usually tough traditional cast
of mind, into an impregnable resolution that de-
fies all new ideas forever after. This divergence
of ideals and attitudes toward life is one of the
most interesting complications of scholarship, for
it is dramatic and flashes out in the class-room,
in aspects at times almost startling.
There is still another thing that complicates
scholarship, at least in the larger colleges that
have professional schools. Two or three years
of regular college work are now required to enter
the schools of law, medicine, divinity, and educa-
tion. An undergraduate who looks forward to
entering these professional schools, too often sees
this period of college work as a necessary but
321
YOUTH AND LIFE
troublesome evil which must be gone through
with as speedily as possible. In his headlong rush
he is apt to slight his work, or take a badly syn-
thesized course of studies, or, in an effort to get
all he can while he is in the college, to gorge him-
self with a mass of material that cannot possibly
be digested. Now, the college work is of course
only prescribed in order that the professionalman
may have a broad backgroimd of general culture
before he begins to specialize. Any hurrying
through defeats this purpose, and renders this
preliminary work worse than useless. A college
course must have a chance to digest if it is to be
at all profitable to aman ;and digestion takestime.
Between the listlessness of the business youths
who have no particular interest in scholarship,
andthe impetuosity oftheprospective professional
man who wants to get at his tools, the ordinary
scholar who wants to learn to think, to get a ro-
bust sort of culture in an orderly and leisurely
way, and feel his mental muscles growing month
by month, gets the worst of it, or at least has little
attention paid to him. The instructor is so busy,
drumming on the laggards or restraining the reck-
less, that the scholar has to work out much of his
own salvation alone.
322
THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW
Whether or not all this is good for the scholar
in cultivating his self-reliance, the general level
of scholarship certainly suffers. Neither the col-
lege administration nor the faculties have been
entirely guiltless, in the past, of yielding before
the rising tide of extra-curricular activities. Ath-
letics, through the protection, supervision, and
even financial assistance, of the college, have
become a thoroughly unwholesome excrescence
on college life. They have become the nucleus
for a perverted college sentiment. College spirit
has come to inean enthusiasm for the winning of
a game, and a college that has no football team is
supposed to have necessarily no college spirit.
Pride and loyalty to Alma Mater, the prestige of
one's college, one's own collegiate self-respect, get
bound up and dependent upon a winning season
at athletics. It seems amazing sometimes to the
undergraduate how the college has surrendered
to the student point of view. Instructors too
often, in meeting students informally, assume that
they must talk about what is supposed to interest
the student rather than their own intellectual
interests. They do not deceive the student, and
they do miss a real opportunity to impress their
personality upon him and to awaken him to a
323
YOUTH AND LIFE
recognition of a broader world of vital interests
than athletic scores and records.
If the college would take away its patronage
of athletics, which puts a direct premium on semi-
professionalism, would circumscribe the club-
house features of the fraternities, and force some
more democraticmethod of selection on the under-
graduate societies, would it have the effect of
raising the general level of scholarship? It surely
seems that such a movement on the part of the col-
lege administration would result in keeping ath-
letics proportioned directly to the interest that
the student body took in it, to the extent of their
participation in it, and the voluntary support
that they gave to it, instead of to the amount
of money that an army of graduate managers and
alumni associations can raise for it and to the
exertions of paid professional coaches and volun-
teer rah-rah boys. This would permit college sen-
timent to flow back into its natural channels, so
that the undergraduate might begin to feel some
pride in the cultural prestige of his college, and
acquire a new respect for the scholarly achieve-
ments of its big men. This would mean an
awakened interest in scholarship. The limitation
of extra-curricular activities would mean that
THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW
that field would become less adequate as a place
for acquiring distinction; opportunity would be
diminished, and it would become more and more
difficult to maintain social eminence as the sine qua
non of campus distinction. Who knows but what
these activities might be finallyabandoned entirely
to the unpresentable class, and the ruling class
seize upon the field of scholarship as a surer way of
acquiring distinction, since the old gods had fled?
If the college is not yet ready to adopt so dras-
tic an attitude, it has at least already begun to
preach democracy. It is willing to preach inspjra-
tionally what it cannot yet do actively. In the
last few years there has been creeping into the
colleges in the person of the younger teachers a
new spirit of positive conviction, a new enthusi-
asm, that makes a college education to-day a real
inspiration to the man who can catch the message.
And at the risk of being considered a traitor to his
class, the sincere undergraduate of to-day must
realize the changed attitude, and ally himself
with his radical teachers in spirit and activity. Hethen gets an altered view of college life. He begins
to see the college course as an attempt, as yet not
fully organized but becoming surer of its purpose
as time goes on, to convert the heterogeneous
325
YOUTH AND LIFE
mass of American youth— scions of a property-
getting class with an antiquated tradition and
ideals that are out of harmony with the ideals of
the leaders of thought to-day; slightly dispirited
aliens, whose racial ideals have been torn and con-
fused by the disintegrating influences of Ameri-
can life; men of hereditary culture; penniless ad-
venturers hewing upward to a profession— to a
democratic, realistic, scientific attitude toward
life that will harmonize and explain the world as
a man looks at it, enable him to interpret human
nature in terms of history and the potentialities
of the future, and furnish as solid and sure an
intellectual and spiritual support as the old re-
ligious background of our fathers that has been
fading these many years.
This is the work of the college of to-day, as it
was the work of the college of fifty years ago to
justify the works of God to man. The college thus
becomes for the first time in American history a
reorganizing force. It has become thoroughly
secularized these last twenty years, and now finds
arrayed against it, in spirit at least if not in open
antagonism, the churches and the conservative
moulders of opinion. The college has a great
opportunity before it to become, not only the
THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW
teacher, but the inspirational centre of the thought
and ideals of the time.
If to the rising generation our elders rarely seem
quite contemporaneous in their criticisms of
things, we in turn are apt to take the ordinary for
the unique. We may be simply reading into the
college our own enthusiasms, and may attribute
to the college a new attitude when it is ourselves
that are different. But I am sure that some such
ideal is vaguely beginning to crystallize in the
minds of the younger professors and the older
undergraduates, or those who have been out in the
world long enough to get a slightly objective point
of view, The passing of the classics has meant
much more than a mere change in the curriculum
of the college; it has meant a complete shifting
of attitude. The classics as a cultural core about
which the other disciplines were buUt up have
given place to the social sciences,- especially his-
tory, which is hailed now by some of its enthusi-
astic devotees as the sum of all knowledge. The
union of humanistic spirit with scientific point of
view, which has been longed for these many years,
seems on the point of being actually achieved,
and it is the new spirit that the colleges seem to
be propagating.
327
YOUTH AND LIFE
I am sure that it is a democratic spirit. History,
economiicsj and the other social sciences are pre-
sented as the record of the development of human
freedom, and the science of man's social life. Weare told to look on institutions not as rigid and
eternally fixed, but as fluid and in the course of
evolution to an ever higher cultivation of indi-
viduality and general happiness, and to cast our
thinking on public questions into this new mould.
A college man is certainly not educated to-day
unless he gets this democratic attitude. That is
what makes the aristocratic organization of un-
dergraduate life doubly unfortunate. For one of
the most valuable opportunities of college life is
the chance to get acquainted, not politely and dis-
tantly, but intimately, with all types of men and
minds from all parts of the coimtry and all classes
of society, so that one may leam what the young
men of the generation are really thinking and
hoping. Knowledge of men is an indispensable
feature of a real education: not a knowledge of
their weaknesses, as too many seem to mean by
the phrase, but knowledge of their strength and
capabilities, so that one may get the broadest
possible sympathy with human life as it is actu-
ally lived to-day, and not as it is seen through the
328
THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW
idealistic glasses of former generations. The asso-
ciation only with men of one's own class, such as
the organization of college life to-day fosters, is
simply fatal to any broad understanding of life.
The refusal to make the acquaintance while in
college of as many as possible original, self-
dependent personalities, regardless of race and
social status, is morally suicidal. There are indi-
cations, however, that the preaching of the demo-
cratic gospel is beginning to have its influence, in
the- springing-up of college forums and societies
which do without the rigid coaptation that has
cultivated the cutting one's self off from one's
fellows.
I am sure that it is a scientific spirit. The scien-
tific attitude toward life is no longer kept as the
exclusive property of the technical schools. It has
found its way into those studies that have been
known as humanistic, but, in penetrating, it has
become colored itself, so that the student is
shown the world, not as a relentless machine,
running according to mechanical laws, but as an
organism, profoundly modifiable and directive by
human will and purpose. He learns that the
world in which he lives is truly a mechanism, but
a mechanism that exists for the purpose of turning
329
YOUTH AND LIFE
out products as man shall direct for the enrich-
ment of his own life. He learns to appreciate
more the application to social life of machinery in
organization and cooperation; he gets some idea
of the forces that build up human nature and
sway men's actions. He acquires an impartial
way of looking at things; effort is made to get
him to separate his personal prejudices from the
larger view, and get an objective vision of menand events. The college endeavors with might and
main to cultivate in him an open-mindedness, so
that at twenty-five he will not close up to the
entrance of new ideas, but will find his college
course merely introductory to life, a learning of
one's bearings in a great world of thought and
activity, and an inspiration to a constant working
for better things.
I am sure that it is a critical spirit. A critical
attitude toward life is as bad a thing for a boy as
it is an indispensable thing for an educated man.
The college tries to cultivate it gradually in its
students, so that by the end of his four years a
man wDl have come simply not to take every-
thing for granted, but to test and weigh and prove
ideas and institutions with which he comes in con-
tact. Of course the results are unfortunate when
THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW
this critical attitude comes with a sudden shock so
as to be a mere disillusionment, the turning yellow
of a beautiful world; but it must come if a manis to see wisely and understand. The college must
\
teach him to criticize without rancor, and see that I
his cynicism, if that must come too, is purging and|
cleansing and not bitter.
And lastly, I am sure that it is an enthusiastic
spirit. The college wants to give a man a keen
desire for social progress, a love for the arts, a
delight in sheer thinking, and a confidence in his
own powers. It will do little good to teach a manabout what men have thought and done and built
unless some spark is kindled, some reaction pro-
duced that will have consequences for the future;
it will do little good to teach him about literature
and the arts unless some kind of an emotional
-push is imparted to hfm that will drive him on
to teach himself further and grow into a larger
appreciation of the best; it will do little good to
enforce scientific discipline unless by it the mind
is forged into a keener weapon for attacking
problems and solving them scientifically and not
superficially. And it is just this enthusiasm that
the college, and only the college, can impart. Wecome there to leam from men, not from books.
331
YOUTH AND LIFE
We could learn from books as well at home, but
years of individual study will not equal the in-
spirational value of one short term of listening to
the words of a wise and good man. Only enthu-
siasm can knit the scattered ideals and timorous
aspirations into a constructive whole.
Some such spirit as I have endeavored to out-
line, the college is beginning to be infused with
to-day; some such spirit the undergraduate must
get if he is to be in the best sense educated and
adequately equipped for the complex work of the
world. If such a spirit is instilled, it almost mat-
ters little what the details of his courses are, or the
mere material of his knowledge. Such an attitude
will be a suflBcient preparation for life, and ade-
quate training for citizenship. We want citizens
who are enthusiastic thinkers, not docile and im-
critical followers of tradition; we want leaders of
public opinion with the scientific point of view:
unclassed men, not men like the leaders of the
passing generation, saturated with class preju-
dices and class ideals.
The college is rapidly revising its curriculum in
line with the new standards. The movement is so
new, to be sure, that things have hardly got their
bearings yet. Men who graduated only ten years
THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW
ago tell me that there was nothing like this newspirit when they were in college. The student
finds a glut of courses, and flounders around for
two or three years before he gets any poise at all.
A judicious mixture of compulsory and elective
courses seems to be furnishing a helpful guide, and
a system of honor courses like that recently intro-
duced at Columbia provides an admirable means,
not only to a more intensive culture, but also to
the sjTithesis of intellectual interests that creates
a definite attitude toward life, and yet for the
absence of which so many young men of ability
and power stand helpless and undecided on the
threshold of active life. To replace the classics,
now irretrievably gone as the backbone of the
curriculum, the study of history seems an admir-
able discipline, besides furnishing the indispens-
able background for the literary and philosophi-
cal studies. Scientific ethics and social psychology
should occupy an important place in the revised
curriculum. The college cannot afford to leave
the undergraduate to the mercies of conventional
religion and a shifting moral tradition.
The pedantic, Germanistic type of scholarship
is rapidly passing. The divisions between the
departments are beginning to break down. Al-
333
YOUTH AND LIFE
ready the younger instructors are finding their
ideal professor in the man who, while he knows
one fcranch thoroughly, is interested in a wide
range of subjects. The departments are react-
ing upon one another; both undergraduates and
instructors are coming to see intellectual life as
a whole, and not as a miscellaneous collection
of specialized chunks of knowledge. The type of
man is becoming common who could go to almost
any other department of the college and give a
suggestive and interesting, if not erudite, lecture
on some subject in connection with its work. It is
becoming more and more common now that when
you touch a professor you touch a man and not
an intellectual specialty.
The undergraduate himself is beginning to react
strongly to this sort of scholarship. He catches
an inspiration from the men in the faculty who
exhibit it, and he is becoming expert in separating
the sheep from the goats. He does not want ex-
periments in educational psychology tried upon
him : all he demands in his teacher is personality.
He wants to feel that the instructor is not simply
passing on dead knowledge in the form it was
passed on to him, but that he has assimilated it
and has read his own experience into it, so that
334
THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW
it has come to mean more to him than almost
anything in the world.
Professors are fond of saying that they like to
have their students react to what they bring
them; the student in turn likes to feel that the
professor himself has reacted to what he is teach-
ing. Otherwise his teaching is very apt to be in
vain. American youth are very much less docile
than they used to be, and they are little content
any longer to have second-hand knowledge, a
little damaged in transit, thrust upon them. The
undergraduate wants to feel that the instructor is
giving him his best all the time, a piece out of the
very warp and woof of his own thinking.
The problem of the college in the immediate
future is thus to make these ideals good, to per-
meate undergraduate society with the new spirit,
and to raise the level of scholarship by making
learning not an end in itself but a means to life.
The curriculum and administrative routine will be
seen simply as means to the cultivation of an atti-
tude towards life. As the ideals crystallize out
and the college becomes surer and surer of its
purpose, it will find itself leading the thought of
the age in new channels of conviction and con-
structive statesmanship through its inspirational
335
YOUTH AND LIFE
influence on the young men of the time. Admit-
ting that these ideals are still imorganized and
unestablished, that in many of the colleges they
have hardly begun to appear, while even in the
larger ones they are little more than tendencies as
yet,— is it too much to hope that a few years will
see the college conscious of its purpose, and al-
ready beginning to impose on the rank and file
of its members, instructors and undergraduates
alike, the ideals which have been felt this last
decade by the more sensitive?
XIV
A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
XIV
A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
It would not perhaps be thought, ordinarily,
that the man whom physical disabilities have|
made so helpless that he is unable to move around
among his fellows, can bear his lot more happily,
even though he suffer pain, and face life with a
more cheerful and contented spirit, than can
the man whose handicaps are merely enough to
mark him out from the rest of his fellows without
preventing him from entering with them into
mostof their common affairs and experiences. But
the fact is that the former's very helplessness
makes him content to rest and not to strive. I
know a young man so helplessly disabled that he
has to be carried about, who is happy in reading
a little, playing chess, taking a course or two in
college, and all with the sunniest good-will in the
world, and a happiness that seems strange and
unaccountable to my restlessness. He does not
cry for the moon.
When the handicapped youth, however, is in full
possession of his faculties, and can move about
YOUTH AND LIFE
freely, he is perforce drawn mto all the currents
of life. Particularly if he has his own way in the
world to make, his road is apt to be hard and
rugged, and he will penetrate to an unusual depth
in his interpretation both of the world's attitude
toward such misfortunes, and of the attitude to-
ward the world which such misfortunes tendto cul-
tivate in men like him. For he has all the battles
of a stronger man to fight, and he is at a double
disadvantage in fighting them. He has constantly
with him the sense of being obliged to make extra
efforts to overcome the bad impression of his phy-
sical defects, and he is haunted with a constant
feeling of weakness and low vitality which makes
effort more diflBcult and renders him easily faint-
hearted and discouraged by failure. He is never
confident of himself, because he has grown up in
an atmosphere where nobody has been very confi-
dent of him; and yet his environment and circum-
stances call out all sorts of ambitions and ener-
gies in him which, from the nature of his case,
are bound to be immediately thwarted. This atti-
tude is likely to keep him at a generally low level
of accomplishment unless he have an unusually
strong will, and a strong will is perhaps the last
thing to develop under such circumstances.
340
A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
The handicapped man is always conscious that
the world does not expect very much from him.
And it takes him a long time to see in this a chal-
lenge instead of a firm pressing down to a low
level of accomplishment. As a result, he does
not expect very much of himself; he is timid in
approaching people, and distrustful of his ability
to persuade and convince. He becomes extraordi-
narily sensitive to other people's first impressions
of him. Those who are to be his friends he knows
instantly, and further acquaintance adds little to
the intimacy and warm friendship that he at once
feels for them. On the other hand, those who do
not respond to him immediately cannot by any
effort either on his part or theirs overcome that
first alienation.
This sensitiveness has both its good and its bad
sides. It makes friendship the most precious thing
in the world to him, and he finds that he arrives
at a much richer and wider intimacy with his
friends than do ordinary men with their light,
surface friendships, based on good fellowship or
the convenience of the moment. But on the other
hand this sensitiveness absolutely unfits him for
business and the practice of a profession, where
one must be "all things to aU men," and the pro-
341
YOUTH AND LIFE
fessional manner is indispensable to success. For
here, where he has to meet a constant stream of
men of all sorts and conditions, his sensitiveness
to these first impressions will make his case hope-
less. Except with those few who by some secret
sympathy will seem to respond, his physical defi-
ciencies will stand like a huge barrier between his
personality and other men's. The magical good
fortune of attractive personal appearance makes
its way almost without effort in the world, break-
ing down all sorts of walls of disapproval and lack
of interest. Even the homely person can attract
by personal charm.
The doors of the handicapped man are always
locked, and the key is on the outside. He mayhave treasures of charm inside, but they will never
be revealed unless the person outside coSperates
with him in unlocking the door. A friend becomes,
to a much greater degree than with the ordinary
man, the indispensable means of discovering one's
own personality. One only exists, so to speak,
with friends. It is easy to see how hopelessly
such a sensitiveness incapacitates a man for busi-
ness, professional or social life, where the hasty
and superficial impression is everything, and dis-
aster is the fate of the man who has not all the
342
A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
treasures of his personality in the front window,
where they can be readily inspected and appraised.
It thus takes the handicapped man a long time
to get adjusted to his world. Childhood is perhaps
the hardest time of all. As a child he is a strange
creature in a strange land. It was my own fate
to be just strong enough to play about with the
other boys, and attempt all their games and
"stunts," without being strong enough actually
to succeed in any of them. It never used to occur
to me that my failures and lack of skill were due
to circumstances beyond my control, but I would
always impute them, in consequence of my rigid
Calvinistic bringing-up, I suppose, to some moral
weakness of my own. I suffered tortures in trying
to learn to skate, to climb trees, to play ball, to
conform in general to the ways of the world. I
never resigned myself to the inevitable, but over-
exerted myself constantly in a grim determination
to succeed. I was good at my lessons, and through
timidity rather than priggishness, I hope, a very
well-behaved boy at school; I was devoted, too,
to music, and learned to play the piano pretty
well. But I despised my reputation for excellence
in these things, and instead of adapting myself
philosophically to the situation, I strove and
YOUTH AND LIFE
have been striving ever since to do the things I
could not.
As I look back now it seems perfectly natural
that I should have followed the standards of the
crowd, and loathed my high marks in lessons and
deportment, and the concerts to which I was sent
by my aunt, and the exhibitions of my musical
skill that I had to give before admiring ladies.
Whether or not such an experience is typical of
handicapped children, there is tragedy there for
those situated as I was. For had I been a little
weaker physically, I should have been thrown
back on reading omnivorously and cultivating mymusic, with some possible results; while if I had
been a little stronger, I could have participated
in the play on an equal footing with the rest. As
it was, I simply tantalized myself, and grew up
with a deepening sense of failure, and a lack of
pride in that at which I really excelled.
When the world became one of dances and par-
ties and social evenings and boy-and-girl attach-
ments,— the world of youth,— I was to find my-
self still less adapted to it. And this was the harder
to bear because I was naturally sociable, and all
these things appealed tremendously to me. This
world of admiration and gayety and smiles and344
A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
favors and quick interest and companionship,
however, is only for the well-begotten and the
debonair. It was not through any cruelty or dis-
like, I think, that I was refused admittance; in-
deed they were always very kind about inviting
me. But it was more as if a ragged urchin had been
asked to come and look through the window at
the light and warmth of a glittering party; I was
truly in the world, but not of the world. Indeed
there were times when one would almost prefer
conscious cruelty to this silent, unconscious, gentle
oblivion. And this is the tragedy, I suppose, of
all the ill-favored and unattractive to a greater
or less degree; the world of youth is a world of
so many conventions, and the abnormal in any di-
rection is so glaringly and hideously abnormal.
Although it took me a long time to understand
this, and I continued to attribute my failure
mostly to my own character, trying hard to com-
pensate for my physical deficiencies by skill and
cleverness, I suffered comparatively few pangs,
and got much better adjusted to this world than
to the other. For I was older, and I had acquired
a lively interest in all the social politics; I would
get so interested in watching how people behaved,
and in sizing them up, that only at rare intervals
345
YOUTH AND LIFE
would I remember that I was really having no
hand in the game. This interest just in the ways
people are human, has become more and more a
positive advantage in my life, and has kept sweet
many a situation that might easily have cost me a
pang. Not that a person with disabilities should
be a sort of detective, evil-mindedly using his so-
cial opportunities for spying out an4 analyzing his
friends' foibles, but that, if he does acquire an in-
terest in people quite apart from their relation
to him, he may go into society with an easy
conscience and a certainty that he will be enter-
tained and possibly entertaining, even though he
cuts a poor enough social figure. He must simply
not expect too much.
Perhaps the bitterest struggles of the handi-
capped man come when he tackles the business
world. If he has to go out for himself to look for
work, without fortune, training, or influence, as
I personally did, his way will indeed be rugged.
•His disability will work against him for any posi-
tion where he must be much in the eyes of men,
and his general insignificance has a subtle influ-
ence in convincing those to whom he applies that
he is unfitted for any kind of work. As I have
suggested, his keen sensitiveness to other people's
346
A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
impressions of him makes him more than usually
timid and unable to counteract that fatal first
impression by any display of personal force and
will. He cannot get his personality over across
that barrier. The cards seem stacked against
him from the start. With training and influence
something might be done, but alone and unaided
his case is almost hopeless. The attitude toward
him ranges from, "You can't expect us to create a
place for you," to, "How could it enter your head
that we should find any use for you?" He is dis-
counted at the start: it is not business to make
allowances for anybody; and while people are not
cruel or unkind, it is the hopeless finality of the
thing that fills one's heart with despair.
The environment of a big city is perhaps the
worst possible that a man in such a situation
could have. For the thousands of seeming oppor-
tunities lead one restlessly on and on, and keep
one's mind perpetually unsettled and depressed.
There is a poignant mental torture that comes
with such an experience, — the urgent need, the
repeated failure, or rather thejepeated failure
even to obtain a chance to fail, the realization that
those at home can ill afford to have you idle, the
growing dread of encountering people,— all this
347
YOUTH AND LIFE
is something that those who have never been
through it can never realize. Personally I know
of no particular way of escape. One can expect
to do little by one's own unaided efforts. I solved
my diflSculties only by evading them, by throwing
overboard some of my responsibility, and taking
the desperate step of entering college on a scholar-
ship. Desultory work is not nearly so humiliating
when one is using one's time to some advantage,
and college furnishes an ideal environment where
the things at which a man handicapped like my-
self can succeed really count. One's self-respect
can begin to grow like a weed.
For at the bottom of all the difficulties of a manlike me is really the fact that his self-respect is
so slow in growing up. Accustomed from child-
hood to being discounted, his self-respect is not
naturally very strong, and it would require pretty
constant success in a congenial line of work really
to confirm it. If he could only more easily separ-
ate the factors that are due to his physical dis-
ability from those that are due to his weak will
and character, he might more quickly attain self-
respect, for he would realize what he is responsible
for, and what he is not. But at the beginning he
rarely makes allowances for himself; he is his own348
A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
severest judge. He longs for a "strong will," and
yet the experience of having his efforts promptly
nipped off at the beginning is the last thing on
earth to produce that will.
If the handicapped youth is brought into harsh
and direct touch with the real world, life proves
a much more complex thing to him than to the
ordinary man. Many of his inherited platitudes
vanish at the first touch. Life appears to him as
a grim struggle, where ability does not necessarily
mean opportunity and success, nor piety sym-
pathy, and where helplessness cannot count on as-
sistance and kindly interest. Human affairs seem
to be running on a wholly irrational plan, and
success to be founded on chance as much as on
anything. But if he can stand the first shock of
disillusionment, he may find himself enormously
interested in discovering how they actually do
run, and he will want to burrow into the motives
of men, and find the reasons for the crass inequal-
ities and injustices of the world he sees around
him. He has practically to construct anew a world
of his own, and explain a great many things to
himself that the ordinary person never dreams of
finding unintelligible at all. He will be filled with
a profound sympathy for all who are despised and
349
YOUTH AND LIFE
ignored in the world. When he has been through
the neglect and struggles of a handicapped and
ill-favored man himself, he will begin to under-
stand the feelings of all the horde of the unpresent-
able and the unemployable, the incompetent and
the ugly, the queer and crotchety people who
make up so large a proportion of human folk.
We are perhaps too prone to get our ideas and
standards of worth from the successful, without
reflecting that the interpretations of life which
patriotic legend, copy-book philosophy, and the
sayings of the wealthy give us, are pitifully inade-
quate for those who fall behind in the race. Surely
there are enough people to whom the task of mak-
ing a decent living and maintaining themselves
and their families in their social class, or of win-
ning and keeping the respect of their fellows, is a
hard and bitter task, to make a philosophy gained
through personal disability and failure as just
and true a method of appraising the life around
us as the cheap optimism of the ordinary profes-
sional man. And certainly a kindlier, for it has no
shade of contempt or disparagement about it.
It irritates me as if I had been spoken of con-
temptuously myself, to hear people called "com-
mon" or " ordinary," or to see that deadlyand deli-
350
A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
cate feeling for social gradations crop out, which
so many of our upper middle-class women seem
to have. It makes me wince to hear a man spoken
of as a failure, or to have it said of one that he
"doesn't amount to much." Instantly I want
to know why he has not succeeded, and what
have been the forces that have been working
against him. He is the truly interesting person,
and yet how little our eager-pressing, on-rushing
world cares about such aspects of life, and howhideously though unconsciously cruel and heart-
less it usually is
!
Often I had tried in argumenttoshowmy friends
how much of circumstance and chance go to the
making of success; and when I reached the age of
sober reading, a long series of the works of radical
social philosophers, beginning with Henry George,
provided me with the materials for a philosophy
which explained why men were miserable and
overworked, and why there was on the whole so
little joy and gladness among us, — and which
fixed the blame. Here was suggested a goal, and
a definite glorious future, toward which all good
men might work. My own working hours became
filled with visions of how men could be brought
to see all that this meant, and how I in particular
351
YOUTH AND LIFE
might work some great and wonderful thing fo*
human betterment. In more recent years, the
study of history and social psychology and ethics
has made those crude outlines sounder and more
normal, and brought them into a saner relation
to other aspects of life and thought, but I have
not lost the first glow of enthusiasm, nor my be-
lief in social progress as the first right and perma-
nent interest for every thinking and true-hearted
man or woman.
I am ashamed that my experience has given meso little chance to count in any way either to-
ward the spreading of such a philosophy or toward
direct influence and action. Nor do I yet see
clearly how I shall be able to count effectually
toward this ideal. Of one thing I am sure, how-
ever: that life will have little meaning for me ex-
cept as I am able to contribute toward some such
ideal of social betterment, if not in deed, then in
word. For this is the faith that I believe we need
to-day, all of us, — a truly religious belief in hu-
man progress, a thorough social consciousness, an
eager delight in every sign and promise of social
improvement, and best of all, a new spirit of
courage that will dare. I want to give to the young
men whom I see, — who, with fine intellect and
352
A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
high prmciples, lack just that light of the future
on their faces that would give them a purpose
and meaning in life, — to them I want to give
some touch of this philosophy, that will energize
their lives, and save them from the disheartening
eflfects of that poisonous counsel of timidity
and distrust of human ideals which pours out in
steady stream from reactionary press and pulpit.
It is hard to tell just how much of this philoso-
phy has been due to handicap. If it is solely to
that that I owe its existence, the price has not
been a heavy one to pay. For it has given mesomething that I should not know how to be with-
out. For, however gained, this radical philoso-
phy has not only made the world intelligible and
dynamic to me, but has furnished me with the
strongest spiritual support. I know that manypeople, handicapped by physical weakness and
failure, find consolation and satisfaction in a very
different sort of faith,— in an evangelical reli-
gion, and a feeling of close dependence on God
and close communion with him. But my experi-
ence has made my ideal of character militant
rather than long-suffering.
I very early experienced a revulsion against the
rigid Presbyterianism in which I had been brought
YOUTH AND LIFE
up, — a purely intellectual revulsion, I believe,
because my mind was occupied for a long time
afterwards with theological questions, and the
only feeling that entered into it was a sort of dis-
gust at the arrogance of damning so great a pro-
portion of the human race. I read T. W. Higgin-
son's "The Sympathy of Religions" with the
greatest satisfaction, and attended the Unitarian
church whenever I could slip away. This faith,
while it still appeals to me, seems at times a little
too static and refined to satisfy me with complete-
ness. For some time there was a considerable
bitterness in my heart at the narrowness of the
people who could still find comfort in the old
faith. Reading Buckle andOliverWendell Holmes
gave me a new contempt for "conventionality,"
and my social philosophy still further tortured
me by throwing the burden for the misery of the
world on these same good neighbors. And all this,
although I think I did not make a nuisance of
myself, made me feel a sgmtual and intellectual
isolation in addition to my more or less effective
physical isolation.
Happily these days are over. The world has
righted itself, and I have been able to appre-
ciate and realize how people count in a social and
354
^ A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
group capacity as well as in an individual and per-
sonal one, and to separate the two in my thinking.
Really to believe in human nature while striving
to know the thousand forces that warp it from its
ideal development, -^ to call for and expect muchfrom men and women, and not to be disappointed
and embittered if they fall short, — to try to do
^ood with people rather than to jthenv— this is
my religion on its human side. And if God exists,
I think that He must be in the warm sun, in the
kindly actions of the people we know and read
of, in the beautiful things of art and nature, and
in the closeness of friendships. He may also be in
heaven, in life, in suffering, but it is only in these
simple moments of happiness that I feel Him and
know that He is there.
Death I do not understand at all. I have seen
it in its crudest, most irrational forms, where
there has seemed no excuse, no palliation. I have
only known that if we were more careful, and
more relentless in fighting evil, if we knew more
of medical science, such things would not be. I
know that a sound body, intelligent care and
training, prolong life, and that the death of a very
old person is neither sad nor shocking, but sweet
and fitting. I see in death a perpetual warning of
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YOUTH AND LIFE
how much there is to be known and done in the
way of human progress and betterment. Andequally, it seems to me, is this true of disease. So
all the crises and deeper implications of Ufe seem
inevitably to lead back to that question of social
improvement, and militant learning and doing.
r This, then, is the goal of my religion,— the
bringing of fuller, richer life to more people on
this earth. All institutions and all works that
do not have this for their object are useless and
pernicious. And this is not to be a mere philo-
sophic precept which may well be buried under a
host of more immediate matter, but a living faith,
to permeate one's thought, and transfuse one's
life. Prevention must be the method against
evil. To remove temptation from men, and to
apply the stimulus which shall call forth their
highest endeavors,— these seem to me the only
right principles of ethical endeavor. Not to keep
'waging the age-long battle with sin and poverty,
but to make the air around men so pure that foul
lungs cannot breathe it, — this should be our
! noblest religious aim.
Education, knowledge and training, — I have
felt so keenly my lack of these things that I coimt
them as the greatest of means toward making life
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noble and happy. The lack of stimulus has tended
with me to dissipate the power which might other-
wise have been concentrated in some one product-
ive direction. Or perhaps it was the many weak
stimuli that constantly incited me and thus kept
me from following one particular bent. I look
back on what seems a long waste of intellectual
power, time frittered away in groping and mop-
ing, which might easily have been spent con-
structively. A defect in one of the physical senses
often means a keener sensitiveness in the others,
but it seems that imless the sphere of action that
the handicapped man has is very much narrowed,
his intellectual ability will not grow in compensa-
tion for his physical defects. He will always feel
that, had he been strong or even successful, he
would have been further advanced intellectually,
and would have attained greater command over
his powers. For his mind tends to be cultivated
extensively, rather than intensively. He has so
many problems to meet, so many things to ex-
plain to himself, that he acquires a wide rather
than a profound knowledge. Perhaps eventually,
by eliminating most of these interests as practi-
cable fields, he may tie himself down to one line
of work; but at first he is pretty apt to find his
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YOUTH AND LIFE
mind rebellious. If he is eager and active, he will
get a smattering of too many things, and his im-
perfect, badly trained organism will make intense
application very difficult.
Now that I have talked a little of my philo-
sophy of life, particularly about what I want to
put into it, there is something to be said also of
its enjoyment, and what I may hope to get out
of it. I have said that my ideal of character was
militant rather than long-suffering. It is true
that my world has been one of failure and deficit,
— I have accomplished practically nothing alone,
and until my college life freed me could count
only two or three instances where I had received
kindly counsel and suggestion; moreover it still
seems a miracle to me that money can be spent
for anything beyond the necessities without being
first carefully weighed and pondered over,—but
it has not been a world of suffering and sacrifice,
my health has been almost criminally perfect in
the light of my actual achievement, and life has
appeared to me, at least since my more pressing
responsibilities were removed, as a challenge and
an arena, rather than a vale of tears. I do not
like the idea of helplessly suffering one's misfor-
tunes, of passively bearing one's lot. The Stoics
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A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
depress me. I do not want to look on my life as
an eternal making the best of a bad bargain.
Granting all the circumstances, admitting all mydisabilities, I want too to "warm both hands
before the fire of life." What satisfactions I
have, and they are many and precious, I do not
want to look on as compensations, but as positive
goods.
The difference between what the strongest of i
the strong and the most winning of the attract-
ive can get out of life, and what I can, is after all
so slight. Our experiences and enjoyments, both
his and mine, are so infinitesimal compared with
the great mass of possibilities; and there must
be a division of labor. If he takes the world of
physical satisfactions and of material success, I
at least can occupy the far richer kingdom of
mental effort and artistic appreciation. And on
the side of what we are to put into life, although
I admit that achievement on my part will be
harder relatively to encompass than on his, at
least I may have the field of artistic creation
and intellectual achievement for my own. In-
deed, as one gets older, the fact of one's disabilities
fades dimmer and dimmer away from conscious-
ness. One's enemy is now one's own weak will,
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YOUTH AND LIFE
and the struggle is to attain the artistic ideal one
has set.
But one must have grown up, to get this atti-
tude. And that is the best thing the handicapped
man can do. Growing up will have given him one
of the greatest satisfactions of hisjife, and cer-
tainly the most durable one. It will mean at least
that he is out of the woods. Childhood has nothing
to offer him; youth little more. They are things to
be gotten through with as soon as possible. For he
will not understand, and he will not be understood.
He finds himself simply a bundle of chaotic im-
pulses and emotions and ambitions, very few of
which, from the nature of the case, can possibly
be realized or satisfied. He is bound to be at cross-
grains with the world, and he has to look sharp
that he does not grow up with a bad temper and a
hateful disposition, and become cynical and bit-
ter against those who turn him away. But grown
up, his horizon will broaden; he will get a better
perspective, and will not take the world so seri-
ously as he used to, nor will failure frighten him
so much. He can look back and see how inevit-
able it all was, and understand how precarious
and problematic even the best regulated of humanaffairs may be. And if he feels that there were
A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
times when he should have been able to count
upon the help and kindly counsel of relatives and
acquaintances who remained dumb and uninter-
ested, he will not put their behavior down as proof
of the depravity of human nature, but as due
to an unfortunate blindness which it will be his
work to avoid in himself by looking out for others
when he has the power.
When he has grown up, he will find that people
of his own age and experience are willing to make
those large allowances for what is out of the or-
dinary, which were impossible to his younger
friends, and that grown-up people touch each
other on planes other than the purely superficial.
With a broadening of his own interests, he will
find himself overlapping other people's personali-
ties at new points, and wUl discover with rare
delight that he is beginning to be imderstood and
appifeciated,— at least to a greater degree than
when he had to keep his real interests hid as some-
thing unusual. For he will begin to see in his
friends, his music and books, and his interest in
people and social betterment, his true life; many
of his restless ambitions will fade gradually away,
and he will come to recognize all the more clearly
some true ambition of his life that is within the
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YOUTH AND LIFE
range of his capabilities. He will have built up
his world, and have sifted out the things that are
not going to concern him, and participation in
which will only serve to vex and harass him. Hemay well come to count his disabilities even as a
blessing, for it has made impossible to him at last
many things in the pursuit of which he would only
fritter away his time and dissipate his interest.
He must not think of "resigning himself to his
fate"; above all, he must insist on his own per-
sonality. For once really grown up, he will find
that he has acquired self-respect and personality.
Grown-upness, I think, is not a mere question of
age, but of being able to look back and under-
stand and find satisfaction in one's experience,
no matter how bitter it may have been.
So to all the handicapped and the unappreci-
ated, I would say,— Grow up as fast as you can.
Cultivate the widest interests you can, and cherish
all your friends. Cultivate some artistic talent, for
you will find it the most durable of satisfactions,
and perhaps one of the surest means of livelihood
as well. Achievement is, of course, on the knees
of the gods; but you will at least have the thrill of
trial, and, after all, not to try is to fail. Taking
your disabilities for granted, and assuming con-
A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
stantlythat they are being taken for granted, make
your social intercourse as broad and as constant
as possible. Do not take the world too seriously,
nor let too many sodal conventions oppress you.
Keep sweet your sense of humor, and above all
do not let any morbid feelings of inferiority creep
into your soul. You will find yourself sensitive
enough to the sympathy of others, and if you do
not find people who like you and are willing to
meet you more than halfway, it will be because
you have let your disability narrow your vision
and shrink up your soul. It will be really your
own fault, and not that of your circumstances. In
a word, keep looking outward; look out eagerly
for those things that interest you, for people who
will interest you and be friends with you, for new
interests and for opportunities to express your-
self. You will find that your disability will come
to have little meaning for you, that it will begin
to fade quite completely out of your sight; you
will wake up some fine morning and find yourself,
after all the struggles that seemed so bitter to
you, really and truly adjusted to the world.
I am perhaps not yet sufficiently out of the
wilderness to utter all these brave words. For, I
must confess, I find myself hopelessly dependent
YOUTH AND LIFE
on my friends and my environment. My friends
have come to mean more to me than almost any-
thing else in the world. K it is far harder work
to make friendships quickly, at least friendships
once made have a depth and intimacy quite be-
yond ordinary attachments. For a man such as
I am has little prestige; people do not feel the
need of impressing him. They are genuine and
sincere, talk to him freely about themselves,
and are generally far less reticent about reveal-
ing their real personality and history and aspira-
tions. And particularly is this so in friendships
with young women. I have found their friend-
ships the most delightful and satisfying of all.
For all that social convention that insists that
every friendship between a young man and wo-
man must be on a romantic basis is necessarily
absent in our case. There is no fringe around us
to make our acquaintance anything but a charm-
ing companionship. With all my friends, the
same thing is true. The first barrier of strange-
ness broken down, our interest is really in each
other, and not in what each is going to think of
the other, how he is to be impressed, or whether
we are going to fall in love with each other. Whenone of my friends moves away, I feel as if a
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great hole had been left in my life. There is a
whole side of my personality that I cannot ex-
press without him. I shudder to think of any
change that will deprive me of their constant com-
panionship. Without friends I feel as if even mymusic and books and interests would turn stale
on my hands. I confess that I am not grown up
enough to get along without them.
But if Iam not yet out of the wilderness, at least
I think I see the way to happiness. With health
and a modicum of achievement, I shall not see
' my lot as unenviable. And if misfortune comes, it
will only be something flowing from the commonlot of men, not from my own particular disability.
Most of the diflficulties that flow from that I flat-
ter myself I have met by this time of my twenty-
fifth year, have looked full in the face^ have
grappled with, and find in no wise so formidable
as the world usually deems them,— no bar to
my real ambitions and ideals.
THE END
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A